Brackelope 2.3 Beta & Feedback

One game only. Took around 5 hours with 22 players.

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Wow, that’s a long tourney. We did a best-of-three three strike tourney with 30 players, and it took six hours (although there were EMs and early SS games involved which helps.)

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Yeah, we had some longer playing games like Spider-man and LOTR in the lineup, which were not modified for tournament play. LOTR even had post rubbers on the inlanes :laughing:

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Thank you to everyone that particpated in the Brackelope beta! The app has been approved by Apple and is available in the app store.

Please continue to provide feedback here as I plan out the next patch. I think I’m going to start with a player/arena manager and a draw all button.

Thank you for all your continued support. This project wouldn’t be the same without this amazing community.

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Thanks @iscrz!

The ability to alter the number of strikes a player has in knockout format, and alter the results of past rounds (ideally PIN protect this!) would give us a way to fix the inevitable mistakes that happen.

When a machine malfunctions, and has to be worked on, it would be convenient to be able to bump the match to “next available arena” and disable the table. going through the “do you really want to delete this table?” and then manually moving the match when a table opens up is a bit cumbersome.

Draw all button would be nice, but “always draw available matches” as an option that can be turned off and on at the tournament level would be even nicer - as soon as a result is reported, draw the next match on that machine.

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I’m new to using Brackelope. I just ran my 2nd tournament with 7 players, 2 strikes knockout format, random and later Swiss. I mirrored it to a large screen TV hanging on the wall of the game room via my AppleTV. Players loved it. This software is awesome!

The thing that was surprising is that we couldn’t draw new matches until everyone had finished the round. There were machines free and 5 people standing around waiting for 2 people to finish. The result was that half the time people were standing around waiting and machines were idle. Is there some way to get matches to draw prior to the round completing so we can keep the tournament moving?

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That is difficult without knowing the results - with a two strike format, you have players eliminated as soon as Round 2.

You wouldn’t want to draw early, and then have to redraw because an eliminated player is in the draw.

Even if only players still in the tourney are included in the draw, the “randomness” of Brackelope falls away to matchups that are based off of speed of play.

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Thank you!

@phendricks nailed it. I’ve been struggling with this since I wrote it. Even if you did the math and knew that R1Match1 someone would be eliminated, you could start round 2 and R2Match1 would be the “Player A vs winner of R1M1”, but then those players in R1M1 would know who they are playing next round, which again takes away from the randomness. Though that might work with Swiss seeding where future matchups are more preditcable.

Here in Portland, we have a special rule for KO’s where we allow players to practice on vacant machines if they’ve already played that round. But I’ve noticed that players are usually seem happy with the break and usually watch the final matches or smoke while they wait for the next round to start.

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Thanks. I guess a double elimination format keeps more games going then - some players can get started as soon as they know who they are playing, or does this wait for the whole round to finish, too?

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Nope, bracketed tournaments have positions predetemined so you can start any match with ready players. Though since players in the winners bracket get byes every other round, if you don’t pay attention you can blow through the main bracket and have to wait very long for the elim. bracket to catch up.

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I’ve been using my wife’s iPad (4th generation) with 2.3 to run 4 WPPR tourneys, and have attempted to “Email Final Results” for each tourney with no success. I really need to get the results submitted soon so any assistance is greatly appreciated!

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Double check you have an email account set up on the device (Settings -> Mail). If that doesn’t work let me knew and we can figure something out.

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Great app! Thanks for helping the tournament scene come alive in North Carolina! One question…are byes considered wins for the purpose of WPPR points? For example if player “A” gets knocked out in round 6, and player “B” gets a bye in round 6, and gets knocked out in round 7, does “B” finish ahead of “A”, or do they tie?

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B finishes ahead of A, since they lasted more rounds. I think Brackelope has a method of listing players by number of wins if you prefer that. Byes don’t count as wins, but most events report players’ position in the order they were eliminated.

Some might say this is unfair, but it’s equally fair in that all players could have been selected for the bye. Brackelope won’t give a player a second bye unless all other players have one.

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That’s what I suspected…thanks for the quick feedback…you rock!

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Question that came about from last Pinholics tournament. Btw, 55 players using 4 strike Swiss on 14 (eventually 12) machines. 4 solid states, 10 DMDs. Entire tournament with pizza break took around 7 hours.

Since solid state games play so much quicker they tend to get drawn more since they finish sooner. We call matches as soon as machines are available so the first few matches in waiting usually get solid states.

The question has to do with the Balancing option. If you have 12 matches ready to play in say the 4th round, and a solid state machine becomes available, does the software try and pick a match where both players haven’t yet played that solid state game, or does it just randomly choose one of the available matches?

Does the balance option also try and avoid re-matches between players until it is inevitable? If so, does the Swiss method take precedence over Balance settings or vice versa?

As always, great software, makes life so much easier for tournament directors, especially ones out of a house with 55 players on a rainy Saturday! Great job.

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Bump for a great question from @alwysmooth.
Inquiring tourney directors want to know!

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I’d really love to hear the answer to this question as this has happened to me several times. When I make a mistake and don’t fix it before the next round, I have to move everything over to a paper bracket and then will use Brackelope to randomly draw arenas. This is a total pain. I know altering completed rounds has a ripple effect, but if there’s any way to not have to go to paper, that would be amazing.

@alwysmooth, in my experience, random rematches tend to happen in smaller tournaments - like 14 or less people. Especially if they are playing really well and on Swiss because there’ll be fewer undefeated or one strike players the further you go on. If you have more players than machines, you will be at the mercy of whichever game finishes first for available arenas.

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Yes, but even then there can be balancing logic applied. For example, if you have 10 arenas and 20 matches, there will be 10 matches waiting for an arena after the initial draw. When an arena opens up, a “Balanced” game assignment should assign it to the players who’ve played that machine least. (Brackelope may already do this, I dunno… but if it doesn’t, it’d be a great enhancement!)

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In my experience half the TD in the world want the best players playing first in that case, half want the “balanced” choice playing and half want something else entirely. :slight_smile:

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