Tournament Scores Can Be Hacked

[brakel]

About 3,000.

Interesting that there were so many more PS3 total players. Does this mean that PS3 players are more likely to play tournaments, more likely to know about the tournament, more competitive or what?

 

[Korven]

Interesting that there were so many more PS3 total players. Does this mean that PS3 players are more likely to play tournaments, more likely to know about the tournament, more competitive or what?

Last time it was +4700 in the mobile tournament.

 

[brakel]

Last time it was +4700 in the mobile tournament.

4646 players in the PS3 tournament. I was under the impression that the install base was much higher on mobile than on the PS3.

 

[smbhax]

It's also a question of what percentage of the players on a given platform know (since the main menu UI doesn't indicate it) or care that there's a tournament going on.

 

[brakel]

It's also a question of what percentage of the players on a given platform know (since the main menu UI doesn't indicate it) or care that there's a tournament going on.

Right, but why? What would it be about the PS3 that would make more players aware. This is just the statistician in me that wants to understand. There is a reason why the PS3 percentage of tournament players compared to the whole is so much higher than the mobile platforms. And if there's a reason then there's meaning behind it.

Here's my hypothesis: PS3 players are much more connected to other players. We can message each other from our consoles. We're used to playing games with our PSN friends. When one of us finds out about a tournament, we tell our other PSN buddies. But its just a theory.

 

[smbhax]

Well, another common theory is that the ratio of casual to hardcore players is higher on mobiles.

 

[Bonzo]

It was the third tourney on mobile...

 

[smbhax]

Yeah! Oh and also, it seemed like for the PS3 tourney they picked the tables most people had, whereas for this latest mobile one they went with some more recent packs, ie probably ones that fewer people owned yet.

 

[ScotchYeti]

Gamercards lists ~10'000 PS3 owners of TPA. Not many people would know about it to track their trophies so a wild estimation would be that there are 80 - 100'000 game owners.

Regarding the mobile tournament, if you look at the highscores it's clear that normal people have no chance to compete. It would be interesting to see by how much the sales have increased.

 

[nstraz]

First time I checked the final results I finished at 110 and now it says 112, just like you.

Ok, I'm not going crazy. I'm down to 114 now. :/

 

[Sean DonCarlos]

Regarding the mobile tournament, if you look at the highscores it's clear that normal people have no chance to compete. It would be interesting to see by how much the sales have increased.

Are you saying that those of us in the upper levels are not normal?

But yeah, I could see where a novice gets through Stiff-o-Meter on Scared Stiff and racks up 40M or so, thinks he did great, and then checks the leaderboard and sees a dozen 500M+ scores and feels a little deflated. Hopefully at some point divisional play can be introduced so more people can feel like they have a shot at doing well.

 

[Heretic]

I know you people arent normal!

 

[Sean DonCarlos]

I know you people arent normal!

Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, pot.

 

[ScotchYeti]

Are you saying that those of us in the upper levels are not normal?

"Normal" refers to the time available for playing pinball. If you have a job and/or a life then it's pretty hard to compete simply because pinball is partly based on luck and you have to play 100s of games to have this one super game.

"Divisional play" sounds good but limiting the number of tries would already make a big difference.

 

[JPelter]

"Normal" refers to the time available for playing pinball. If you have a job and/or a life then it's pretty hard to compete simply because pinball is partly based on luck and you have to play 100s of games to have this one super game.

"Divisional play" sounds good but limiting the number of tries would already make a big difference.

I don't wholly disagree, but I do have to point out that the majority of the time spent at least for me was before the tournament, learning the tables and the shots. Most tables don't have a major luck component to them at all. Big Shot is personally for me the only table I can say I spent a lot of time on during the tournament (more than a few hours), and it is in fact somewhat more luck based than the other ones were in the PS3 tournament. Even in the case of Big Shot you can essentially make your own luck. It's just that reading the table becomes a lot more complex when you don't have clear feeds off shots you know how to respond to as with most tables.

That said, you're absolutely correct that people with more time have an advantage. If people want to limit the number of tries and farsight agrees, I'm totally ok with that. Personally I think just removing extra balls in tournaments from all tables, and possibly adjusting things otherwise to harder tournament settings will reduce the time element somewhat simply due to high scoring games not lasting nearly as long.

I also have to note that when I said more than a few hours means mainly that actually getting to the high score range takes upwards of an hour of playing on practically all tables. If the tables had extra balls removed the time required would be cut pretty drastically on almost all of them

 

[Carl Spiby]

I just got a lucky break because I didn't spend a huge amount of time on the tournament this time around.