What criteria are you guys using to base your votes on? All I can think of is proximity to me. After that I donāt want to just cast votes randomly. Are there any events that deserve my vote more than others? I kind of want to vote for whatever area is the most underrepresented.
This is the sort of issue I was expecting to pop up with forcing people to pick 3. Itās great that youāre not just picking randomly, but I think a lot of people who are less connected to the community will.
I have only been to one event on the list before. The other votes I cast were based off the rave reviews Iāve heard about them and I would like to attend them in the future.
If you have extra votes, itād be great if you could throw them toward NW champs or Vancouver Flipout. Right now there isnāt a single event within 10+ hours of Seattle/Portland/Vancouver.
As a region, you should choose which one youād rather have voted on so votes arenāt split between the two. Obviously locals will vote for both as part of their three. But as somebody who thinks the NW could use more, Iād like to know which one you see having a better shot of winning so I could vote that way.
I would say the most under represented areas are the Southeast and Central US. I threw my extra vote at Asylum in Fort Myers Florida and I donāt know a thing about it.
Iāve heard a lot of Portland support for NWPC specifically and would encourage those with āextraā votes to use them there. I voted for both but if you have one vote to spare, Seattle is in my mind a fair compromise with a similar drive for Vancouver folks and Portland folks, while Vancouver is way more of a trek from Oregon (also I still havenāt renewed my passportā¦).
@trent can correct me, if Iām wrong, but I believe that Trent is āboycottingā the Circuit Voting process with the Expo tournament because he thinks itās a stupid way to chose Circuit Events. I happen to agree with Trent on this and removed the Lyons Spring Classic from voting as well.
Itās just voting to add a few new events each year. If the event performs well it stays. If not it goes back into the voting next year to be reinstated with the other new nominees. Itās not like all 20 events are up for a vote is some big mess like sterns ultimate fan voting. How else do you decide what new events to add in besides letting the people decide? Is there some pinball illuminati thatās suppose to decided the events each year as to what benefits them the best?
I wonder if Freeplay Florida went this same route. I did not see them on the voting ballot and heard from several people who felt confident they would be back on the circuit this year.
< sarcasm>Yes, what a great idea to have your cousinās cousin and that guy you knew from high school 30 years ago, and all your other Facebook Friends vote on the internet for a pinball tournamentās inclusion into the PAPA Circuit because you asked them to! Thatās sounds great and I canāt imagine how else it could possibly be done.< /sarcasm>
In my opinion, An Internet Klout Contest is a ridiculous way to choose which pinball tournaments belong on the Circuit. YMMV.
So Jim proposed another way it could be doneā¦ pinball illuminati as an example of a ridiculous way. And you say the current way is ridiculous. Weāre right where we started.
So does anyone have a āgoodā way as well as a good defense of it or am I just supposed that all the other ways it could possibly be done are too good to be typed out on tiltforums for some reason.
Take the top N WPPR graded events each year and make that your Circuit. Period. Itās completely numerical so there are no external biases, yet it is still the actual players who go to the actual tournaments who ultimately decide which tournaments get in.
For 2016, your Circuit would be:
PAPA (142.73)
Pinburgh (138.13)
EPC (102.57)
Dutch Pinball Masters (70.29)
INDISC (64.59)
Belgium Pinball Open (64.14)
Expo (64.01)
Louisville (63.41)
Hungarian Pinball Open (62.52)
Cleveland (61.28)
Sanctum (60.13)
PPO (60.08)
Pinmasters (59.44)
NWPAS (59.09)
Cali Extreme (59.00)
Swedish Championships (58.50)
Buffalo Pinball Open (57.92)
City Champ (Gold Watch) (57.54)
German Pinball Open (55.53)
Done. List look familiar ? Itās pretty close to what already is, but only took a database query to create. If you want some variety year to year, knock off the bottom 5 each year, and replace with the next 5 for a year and repeatā¦ The next five would be:
Boras Pinball Open (55.30)
NWPC* (52.61)
Pinvasion (52.10)
Matchstick Pinball Open (51.30)
Vancouver Flip-Out (50.82)
your tournamentās not in there ? Well, you need to try and improve it next year and maybe you will get thereā¦ This is all public information (thanks to the awesomeness of the IFPA Rankings), so itās easy enough to know where you need to get to. Offer a bigger prize pool. Entice top level players to playā¦ And if you tournament doesnāt get thereā¦ maybe, it really doesnāt belong on the Circuit just yetā¦ And you know which tournament doesnāt make this cut ? why, the one I run each year, The Lyons Spring Classic (41.62). And if this were the method, I would be absolutely thrilled with that fact. We are space limited at Lyons (if youāve ever been there, you would know why) and even though the LSC is an awesome tournament, itās not quite Circuit Worthy when stacked against the numbers above.
And above all elseā¦ The numbers are completely agnostic (and take like less than a minute to derive).
Thatās pretty much what I had in mind a couple weeks back in this thread with the āpro tour.ā In the case of the Circuit, Dougās not doing that to be a pro tour per se, but to promote pinball, so I can see including some aspect of popularity in this case. The current Circuit version has too much of it IMO, but the resulting list of events is decent, so Iām okay with it in practice for now.
I feel like itās tough to argue that getting non-participants to click a link endorsing your event does more to increase awareness and drive up event attendance than actually getting those former non-participants to show up at your event. In a way this feels akin to the Modern Pinball Selfie League situation ā it rewards TDs (and their regulars) for managing to establish a drive-by level of engagement, rather than something more lasting.
I think Buffalo is the perfect example of getting in by voting elevating the event. It was a great event. If it had not been a circuit event would they have had the same draw, my guess is no. I would argue they did well in voting partially due to the minor celebrity (in pinball terms) of the Bros. But then they followed through. They had good enough survey results to become a major this year.
I would say this is at least one success story for the system last year.