ATLDave

OK, standing by....

You got that vendor lined up yet to thread and cut barrels?

kneelingatlas, is the short-dust-cover frame essential for making your comp work? I'm seriously tempted by it and contemplating getting a 9mm Limited to use as the basis for the build; would the dust-cover have to be cut?

It's a shame that there is so little in the way of resources on the principles of good stage design. There's no library of books on good stage architecture. The information is very fragmented, and that means the learning curve for new MD's is often very steep. With that in mind, and setting aside the fault line question, I'd add this: Making a bunch of highly-punitive shots is not interesting or good stage design. Lots of new stage designers think that nonsense like covering all but the A-zone with no-shoots or sticking no-shoots behind distant mini-poppers is cool or devilish or interesting. It's none of those. It's boring. Slipping in a touch of that stuff is fine if what you're testing is the ability of a shooter to change gears and seriously go 1-for-1, but more than a tiny bit of it is lame. If that's what constituted good stage design, that's all you'd see at matches, because there's nothing hard about coming up with really, really hard shots. That's easy as an MD. Too easy. And lame. Filling up a stage with the hardest shots you can come up with is like a golf course designer making a 600 yard hole and sticking a par-4 sign on it. Anybody can do that. That's not good architecture. Ben Berry did a podcast on what constitutes good stage design. It is worth a listen for anyone doing stage design. I don't necessarily agree with all that he has to say, but I think it's interesting and most MD's would benefit from a listen. https://berryshooting.com/podcast/18-good-stages/ I've designed or built well over 100 stages over the last few years, and I still feel like I'm learning all the time about what makes stages memorable and fun and interesting.

I know what a power law distribution is. Percentiles are perfectly useful in the context of that kind of curve. And far better than picking either an arbitrary near-far-right point and calculating, for each individual, the fraction of that point.

Yep. The weirdness is in the left half, where things are collapsed by the no-negative-HF function. But there's a world of difference between two classifiers where the top 10 shoot the same HF but where the fraction of the shooting population that zeroes the stage is significantly different. It is not hard to imagine two stages where world-class shooters shoot pretty much the same HF, but lower-level shooters have a much harder time with one than the other. Imagine an El Pres with no-shoots on the outside of each target obscuring the D zone. At normal El Prez distances, the D-zone is simply irrelevant to a very high level shooter. He's likely going to shoot a time and hits very close to what he would shoot if those NS's weren't there. But the score curve for the whole population will not be the same. Lower-level shooters will start plugging those NS's. Mid-level shooters will back off the pace to make sure they don't. A percentile-based system will pick up this difference. A HHF percentage system is blind to it. Similar dynamics occur on some of the standards-type stages where the absolute shot difficulty means that misses are common for all but very strong shooters. On one of those stages, a 1.5HF run might be 20% of the HHF, but better than 70% of the scores posted. Our current classifier system is basically going to treat that as a garbage result... but it may indicate a material level of skill above that of the literally-average USPSA shooter. A percentile system would capture that.

That is wrong, wrong, wrong. That is the opposite of the truth.

But you'd also need to transmit the shooter's location, the target location, results of the shot, and (probably) the shooter's velocity (i.e., whether the shooter was static, moving slowly, moving at a dead run, etc.). All this stuff is technologically possible, but would require vastly more effort and resources than we're ever likely to get.

Trent1k1, watch the video linked above. It shows drop on a rifle cartridge at 100 yards. You're going to be dropping several inches at 60 yards with a PCC.

rowdy', if the point is not to provide a "handicap"/weight-class system (i.e., a way to identify a peer group of people of approximately similar skill against whom you can meaningfully compete while GM's are trouncing all of you), then I would say it is not terribly important to try to reduce everything to a single number. Nor, I think, do we currently have the knowledge or analytical basis to combine them in a sensible, non-arbitrary manner. And QBR, which is actually a pretty stupid stat, is a good example of what you get when you kind of SWAG your way to a combination that "seems" right. I very much like your discrete proposed stats, though. I would just track and publish them separately.... it's much more interesting, to me, to understand the different profiles of different QB's than it is to try to reduce their career or year to a single number. If two shooters are doing about as well in matches, but are doing it very different ways (speed vs. high A%; lots of points versus avoidance of penalties; etc.), then being able to see that in numbers would be really interesting. Unfortunately, we'll probably never get to the point of being able to do the kind of stat that would make the most sense for this sport - the HF equivalent of golf's "shots gained" stat. That stat breaks down the game of golf into discrete areas of performance (driving, shots into the green, close shots from near the green where the prior shot missed, and putting) and measures the performance of competitors relative to the field on each of those dimensions. And it can be subdivided by specific distances or other conditions. You can see, for instance, that most of Rory McIlroy's success comes from being better at driving the ball, while Tiger Woods has most frequently excelled in hitting irons (particularly long irons) into the greens. It gives you a very good way to get a sense of the "shape" of someone's game - not just their overall excellence (or lack thereof), but exactly what it is that they do better than the other top-level guys and what it is that limits them. Something like that would really be ideal for USPSA, but it requires collecting discrete data on every single shot. We're not gonna do that. If, on the other hand, we are trying to do something that will very accurately predict match outcomes, then we should collect a bunch of discrete data over some time, then figure out which data fields and in what combination best predicts outcomes. This is how several of the genuinely advanced stats in other sports came to be... people figured out what was a good predictor, and which combinations of good predictors correlated most closely with overall outcomes. That's basically the story of sabermetrics in a nutshell. But back to the topic at hand: simply replacing percentages with a percentile-based system would result in an immediate improvement to the classifier system, by giving clarity to what is being measured and by automatically and continuously adjusting HF's to the correct values. The only big value judgement would be deciding what portion of the shooting population belongs in each classification. After that, the system would basically run itself.

Percentile of classifier would be great if the goal were measuring basic shooting skills compared to the USPSA population. I happen to think that's the most sensible goal, so that's the system I like. ELO would be measuring overall match performance, which would also be interesting, but would of course roll in a bunch of factors beyond just shooting and gun handling. Sort of like WAR in advanced baseball metrics rolling in defense and baserunning along with batting stats. A classifier/percentile system would give you something more like OPS+ or some other overall batting stat that is adjusted to the league. ELO would be what to use if you were trying to predict who would likely win in a head-to-head match. Also a valid goal. What we have now is like... counting the difference in hits between you and Freddie Freeman. It's not useless, but it's not very sophisticated at all.

Amen my brother. Amen.

I'm not certain that's true this time. It could be, but I think they tried to apply some kind of methodology. I'm not saying it was a sophisticated approach, just that it kind of seems that maybe they were trying, in some way, to be "data driven." But since, to my knowledge, they haven't disclosed what/how/why they did what they did, we're suck speculating.

Is that just based on the sample you have seen? I agree completely that the distribution is not quite normal (even leaving aside the no-negative-HF's issue of the left end of the curve being cut off). And I strongly suspect the distribution is perhaps materially different from one classifier to another. I just wish HQ would be open about their methodology and goals. Do they have a particular percentage of the active membership that they think should be in each category? Are they trying to get GM's to represent the top 1%, top 0.5%, top 0.1%? Someone who is 3 standard deviations better than the mean? Which mean - means on particular classifiers, or means of overall classification percentage after taking into account all the "throw-out" aspects of the system? There's obviously no clear "right" answer on this stuff, but it would make for a much more interesting discussion and a more informed membership if they would just lay out their thinking and approach.

I kinda have the feeling that they set the HHF at some level of SD above mean. Maybe 3 standard deviations? IDK if that's what HQ did. I'm not sure that's a good way to do it if it was. But it least it is based on some kind of actual data, rather than just SWAG'ing it.

Interesting.

Is there a gunsmith who is up and running on doing the modifications to work with a Limited?

As others have said, it's generally serviceable as a choice for Production (although not game-optimized in any way), but its peak popularity in that role is long-since past.

Exciting!

Man, knowing the rules is getting to be about like knowing the law: It's all well and good to read the constitution and the statutes, but until you look at the decisions, you really know nothing. FWIW, I think this change is substantively fine. A lot of gear marketed to the USPSA crowd can easily put people outside the old measurement (especially drop-and-offset holster hangars), and I don't see any material advantage being conferred by liberalizing this rule. I'm just struck by how inadequate carrying a rulebook now is.

Well, the MD and the poster went to dinner after the match and had a good time discussing this question. Both the MD (and RM) and the poster were interested in seeing the responses to this question, which, so far, have tracked all the points that came out over dinner and the rulebook (viewed on phones). That said, it's probably fair to say the MD is an a-hole... I'm just not sure this question/issue is the best evidence for that proposition. Especially since the MD didn't assess the penalty (that was another RO).

Thanks! Based on the commentary from you and others about the excessive popple-holing in the Gold Team, I'd be more inclined to try this with a Limited. Lacking a machine shop (or any relevant skills) of my own, having someone put out a turn-key solution would be fantastic.

OH! That looks awesome! What does one need to do to set up a gun with one of these?

No, the rule addresses the condition after make ready while waiting for the beep. If it were limited to time walking around and not being the shooter, I think almost nobody would have a beef with that. Nor, for that matter, with some requirement about any safety-locks being applied to race holsters.