Given the cacophony of incongruent demands I think this was a really good, really well run tourney. Well done @Wayne J & Co
This ^^^^
Given the cacophony of incongruent demands I think this was a really good, really well run tourney. Well done @Wayne J & Co
I think 16 put of 82 into the finals (20% ish) is about right. It means that the qualifiers have earned it, rather than just finishing top half.SO (In my extremely biased opinion) what would I like to see going forward in order to encourage more play/competitiveness/rivalry. A bigger cut line makes sense to me, make it 32, but bring in byes (1st-4th get 2 byes, 5th-16th get 1 bye) and incentivize the top positions. Put a cash bounty on top qualifier. Allow those top qualifiers to have choice of machine in the finals (ooooooh, I know we don't like that in the UK, but if a PAPA style tournament can be successfully received then maybe the times are a changin'.....maybe not ) Basically just put in place more reasons to play so that every machine is being played non stop! Incentivize the top 8-10 players to want to keep on playing, rather than just sticking with their entry that they know will get them in.
I'm sure Wayne, Paul, Ian etc thought about all the things that I have said. And as the first go at it, it was definitely important to not try and run before you can walk, but now it has been proven, lets F***ing Usain Bolt it out of the park.
Tilts.
The tilts on some machines were tighter than on others, without question. Why though should you be able to manhandle every game all over the place. A number of the games turned up without tilt bobs at all. I play tested all of the machines before hand to test the tilt. I didn't tilt TZ or Circus and managed pretty decent scores while doing so. If you think the tilt was too harsh for your style of play in qualifying, simply play a different machine?
4 quid; when a game of pinball is usually £1? 3 games - seems ok here.
Maybe to you and me but when all other games are for free I do wonder if some people who haven't competed before were put off by the charge and I thought the idea was to encourage new players. Might be wrong but possible and how clear was it that all monies went to charity which could be the deciding factor?
I didn't get out of bed early enough for thatThere was an 'early entry' price of £3 for tickets bought before 1pm Saturday. From memory I don't think there were many newbies taking advantage of that though.
That £755 ticket sales figure is quite interesting actually.
Had it been a standard tournament with a £10 ( aka an Ayrton) entry fee with 82 entrants it would have raised £820.
However newbies that stumbled across it and old hands that don't expect to be in the running for the last 16 might not have participated had they had to pay an Ayrton to do so.
For info, I think the person that bought the most tickets clocked in at 13 tickets (and you can use neverdrains to check that it was infact you Dan ).
Speaking to other people, some didn't bother entering the tournament as they felt that they wouldn't make it into the top 16, and I can understand that too. I know I didn't expect to make it into the top 16 either, but I really wanted to try.
Maybe a way around would be to increase the size of the cutoff, but the ones in the bottom half/third/quarter to face their own knockout round before they get added to the rest of the qualifiers. That would then still give good players motivation to enter more times to get into the top qualifiers.
If you had 1 free entry advertised as part of the entry into the expo, most people would come along and have a go. This would lead to more queues and more buzz and excitement around the competition area. Some of these people would get hooked and keep playing, even if they then just played more in the non-competition pinball, it would get more people into pinball, which is what most people on here want.- entry price. I know to most of us £4 seems a very fair price to pay especially when money going to charity but for the less experienced players maybe this seemed a lot on top of the entry price, travel etc when they'll be unfamiliar with comps, how format works and might just be enough to put them off.
I would like to pretend that It was just because I wanted to give loads to charity, not because I'm crap at pinball but really competitive.
When you're just outside the cut off zone it's very tempting to have just one more go.... I just can't seem to have 3 good games in a row though, the more I played, the worse I got .
Extensive discussion here:I know that this might be a bit "New Labour" for folk, but ....
Might it be worthwhile limiting the number of tries people can have. Say 5 attempts ? I know that the argument might be that this is for charity so if mugs are daft enough to keep handing over money, take 'em for all you can. Indeed put fixed odds betting terminals, hookers and coke dealers next to the admin desk to really strip the money from these guys
But in many sports there are mechanisms to stop this sort of thing ... 50 ahead by half time in a rugby match, boxing matches being stopped, formula one has limitations on qualifying