If you go to the standings page ( https://matchplay.events/live/sco2016/standings ) and click on each player you can see how many times they played each arena. I see that only 4 players played an arena 3 times. With 196 games that seems pretty good to me!
When there are multiple games per round arena selection behaves more like a socialist than a libertarian. E.g. if three players in the group has not played Lost World it matter less that the fourth player has played it already. That’s how you end up with Scott May who has only one repeat game, but he played it 3 times.
Assigning arenas for group play and multiple games per round is pretty much the hardest thing Match Play is ever asked to do. To be sure there the algorithm can be improved* but looking at your tournament the distribution looks pretty good to me – Scott May is the one weird outlier.
Balanced arena assignment will always be a “best effort” type thing rather than a “perfect solution” type thing. In most cases a perfect distribution is impossible and MP would be spending far too long searching for the perfect solution (and you don’t want to be waiting a loooooong time while starting the next round).
Do what I do: Tell players that MP isn’t looking to hurt them specifically. It’s pain agnostic and hurts every player equally. It’ll be someone else playing Lost World 3 times in the next tournament.
*) All MP’s pairing and balancing code is available at https://github.com/haugstrup/TournamentUtils if you or someone else is curious. It’s an important part of the app so I wanted to make it available to the public – if you want to build you own tournament you can even use the same pairing code MP uses.
For balancing MP generates 1000 random solutions and picks the best one. I do have plans to improve this using some simple machine learning approaches. Just always busy with other features!
Group knockout question - we enjoyed using match play yesterday for our 29 player 3 strikes event in Columbia MO, but had a conundrum at the end. Two players went out on the last game for second - third places, we thought the software might auto order them based on last game played, but instead showed them tied for second. We tried clicking on the “create playoffs” button, but couldn’t get it to work, so we pseudo randomly picked a game as a second place tiebreaker game.
Love the software,just didn’t know if this was a known issue, and it was contemplated to have ties for those going out at the same time on the same game, and if I failed to somehow use create playoff properly.
It’s expected that a group knockout would work that way. To the software the players were tied for 2nd place. Group knockout never looks at the individual placement, it only concerns itself with number of strikes. Since the players were knocked out in the same round they are tied.
It’s not a bad idea to use the placement in the final match to break the ties. I’ll see if I can’t make that happen.
The “create playoffs” feature will just create a new single elimination bracket tournament and copy over your arenas and players. It’s probably not what you wanted to do in your case
I was the TD at this event. The Matchplay software worked very well. I looked at a handful of players results and what I mostly saw was 2 or 3 pins that were played twice, and the rest only played once. That is the best one could expect, I believe. I did have a few players asking if the pins could be done in “Banks” like Pinburgh, where DMD, SS, EM are represented in every bank. I didn’t see an option for that. Is that possible with Matchplay?
Also, a few complained that the IFPA scoring was unbalanced, but I didn’t see it that way. The only other option is Pinburgh scoring and then you have to deal with those pesky half points in a three player group. Is that how Matchplay deals with Pinburgh scoring on 3 player groups?
Banks
MP doesn’t do banks because it’s very difficult to do software for (even pinburgh has the original game on the scoresheet after replacing a game). MP odes have arena categories and you can restrict arenas drawn to to a specific category. That gives you some freedom to approximate banks. You do have to draw arenas individually for each game right now so it’s a lot of clicking. It’s how we did it for the City Champ playoffs.
I will be working on a few improvements to the category system that’ll make it easier to “fake” machine banks. Look out for improvements in the next month or so.
Pinburgh scoring
MP matches the same scoring used at the actual pinburgh, including those half-points.
IFPA scoring
Is the opposite of unbalanced. It’s completely linear, can’t get more balanced than that!
I’ve been working hard this weekend to let TDs relax a bit more during their tournaments. You can now let players suggest results for their own games!
It works like this:
Players login to their Match Play account and claim their player (this’ll be done automatically for them on subsequent tournaments)
Players now have a “suggest results” button below all their games. They click this to fill out who took 1st/2nd/3rd/4th and optionall add the game scores.
You, the TD, will see these suggested results on the “Rounds” tab and you can approve the result if you like it or enter your own if you don’t.
It’s even possible for scorekeepers to view and approve suggested results.
This is a free feature available to everyone
Just think about the possibilities! When you’re playing a tournament you no longer have to hunt down the TD to get your results entered. Just fill it out on your phone and order another slice of pizza between rounds. (if you’re smart you’ll enable Slack or SMS notifications and your phone will tell you where to go next).
You’ll find the new configuration option near the bottom of the tournament details form, in the “scorekeeper” section
Best Game / Super Selfie Leagues
But wait! That’s not all! @timmychap had a brilliant idea: Why limit this to match play tournaments? You can also let players submit their own scores on Best Game tournaments. You, the TD, still has to approve the submitted scores of course.
I think this’ll be very useful if you are running a super selfie league. Let your players enter their own scores and now you only have to compare the photos to the scores already entered. Less typing, more pinball!
Match Play Live will even display pending scores so players can see what they need to shoot for even if the TD hasn’t had time to approve scores yet.
For Best Game tournaments players will enter scores on the arena page on Match Play Live and you’ll approve them on the “Scores” tab.
And finally the free trial is now 90 days instead of 14 days. That way you can try it out for your super selfie league for a couple of months without having to signup for the premium plan. If you choose to upgrade the premium plan will set you back a measly $1.66 per month (less than two games of pinball)
What’s the issue with banks? You’re a better softie than me, but I can think up a couple approaches that shouldn’t be too impossible. I’m not sure how your data structures work, so I’m not going to go suggesting things willy-nilly.
(Of course, the other way is to make each ‘arena’ a bank, rather than a game, which is what I assume you mean by ‘faking’ a bank?)
I wasn’t being clear. What I should have said was “Banks is a ton of UI work and most TDs don’t want banks after all so I can make more people happy by spending my time doing other stuff”.
From a software dev. perspective I absolutely think the right way to go about it is to treat a bank any other arena. That way the same balancing approach can be taken. Unfortunately for Match Play that would require a lot of UI work (basically repeating all the arena work).
Other than a few locations TD just don’t have the machines available to use banks in a satisfying manner. I actually had support for machine banks on the very first notes I wrote before I started writing code. But no one was using banks so I never started on implementing it!
So far I’ve found that only one or two TDs have gotten in touch talking about banks and been serious (more have asked but just out of curiousity). Most TDs would rather do e.g. a round of EMs, then a round of DMDs etc. because it allows them to control the timing of the tournament better and a machine breaking down doesn’t completely mess up your tournament.
All that hand waving aside: I am trying to find a way to support sort-of banks (multiple games per round with a machines from specific categories assigned to each game in the round). The tricky part there is handling repeat machines (MP usually takes great care in not assigning an arena that’s already in use) and handling situations where the TD doesn’t have enough games to cover all groups (again: You want to assign multiples of the same game in this situation, unlike all other situations)
Initial Selfie League support has landed in Match Play!
Players can submit their own scores (including photo) and share their score on Facebook using a “share on facebook” button that shows up right after they have submitted.
Tournament directors can approve scores without having to do any typing! The photo is shown along with the score. The TD can even see where the photo was taken (to avoid the most obvious cheating).
Excellent! We just started a “beta test” of a super league at our location, using Match Play. I’ll let you know if we notice any issues.
One thing that struck me was that the Queue concept doesn’t make sense in the super league context, so the Queue tab being the default tab in Scorekeeper view could be a bit confusing to the players. Could you make Scores the default tab in the Scorekeeper view for super league type tournaments, or something?
I agree! I’ll be putting my thinking hat on to figure out a way to make Queues less in your face hopefully without having to introduce Yet Another Configuration Option.
I’ve fixed it for you. Tell Larry he owes you a beer for having fat fingers
A little more info: Neither you or the organizer can change this after the fact, but you did get me to start thinking about how that may work. The organizer could have prevented this by adding an IFPA number to the player. In that case Larry would not have been able to claim he was you because the Match Play user email has to match the IFPA registered email. But that requires players to be registered with the IFPA which is another headache.
It’s complicated, but I’m thinking about it. Will likely start to rely more on names and less on emails going forward. Stay tuned.
Just getting set up to run my first tourney with Match play. I plan on setting it up as a match play event. Is there a way to choose how many players are eliminated in a round? So after round 1 you could have 1 or 2 players eliminated. Assuming you play 3 4 player groups and eliminate 1 person after round one will it then reseed the remaining players into their appropriate 3 player groups.
If you want to eliminate players from each group/game setup a knockout tournament. E.g. a group knockout will eliminate two players from each four-player group each round.
If you manually want to eliminate certain players all you have to do is head to the “Players” tab and deactivate the players you don’t want in your tournament anymore. As long as you do this before you start the next round those players will not be drawn in the next round.
Does that help?
FYI: Match Play Events will make as few three player groups as possible. So if you have three four-player groups (12 players) and eliminate one player you will have two four-player groups and one three-player group in the following round.
I want to setup a Selfie League, but this will be my first time running any sort of tournament. I’d love some feedback from you, or anyone else who is willing to offer advice.
How do you suggest running the finals? I like @pinwizj’s system where the finals have cutoffs for different brackets since it let’s everyone play in a finals while maximizing the WPPR points for the top players. http://www.neverdrains.com/level257/playerIndex.php
Is that possible with Matchplay? If so, how should I do that?
we do normal PAPA style top8-16 depending on how many players total (10-50% cut off needs to be followed) for ours. Works easy with MatchPlay, we even did top 14 (top4 had a bye) this month since we had less than 32 players but more than 24 and it handled perfectly! (Woot to @haugstrup)
I just make tournament software. I don’t run tournaments. So take anything I say that isn’t software related with a grain of salt
With Match Play you can always setup as many tournaments as you want. So if you want to have 4 divisions just setup 4 different tournaments for finals. Each division will have to be a separate tournament so @pinwizj’s system with a separate “final” for every 4 players will be very tedious to setup in Match Play.
