I’ve been thinking about running a tournament with a weird format that can’t really be easily mapped to any existing software that I know of, but also can’t be easily run on paper. I do software development for my day job, so it’s no problem coding something up, but it seems like a lot of wasted effort creating a whole new software package (user registration, notifications, arenas, etc) when all of that is handled great by other software.
Is there any tournament software/systems out there that has an available API to hook into for selecting players/games, or a scripting language, or is open source?
The startup costs are non-trivial and very boring to implement. There’s also quite a bit of nuance to tournament software that may not be apparent when starting out. Creating an app for public use is probably too much work right away. I’d recommend doing the minimum amount of programming in order to try out your tournament format for a real tournament. Even if it means writing command line utilities and running the tournaments that way or using custom spreadsheets like @jrb suggests. You won’t know if the tournament format is a winner until you’ve played it a handful of times!
@jrb linked to my open-source repository for Match Play. You can use that code for generating player pairings and assigning arenas. It’s the same code used by Match Play.
I’m very curious what this tournament format is like! Is it a secret?
It’s more of some ideas thrown around than anything right now, another reason why I’d want to just be able to program it and tweak it until I’m satisfied. Sadly as you say, the startup costs are non-trivial; I’d hoped to avoid them.
The big thing in my mind is I’d like to be able to do a round robin format without having to rely on rounds. Give it a set time limit and it’ll try to match people up as much as possible during that time, attempting to give everyone a good balance of opponent skill levels if there isn’t time to play everyone.
I feel like a straight Flip Frenzy/Round Robin is going to end up in a situation where some players finish way earlier than others, or have random big waits for one last opponent to be free