I don’t remember why I didn’t factor in previously faced opponents when I wrote the group swiss pairing code. Probably because computers are hard. But since I don’t remember I’ve developed a healthy amount of hubris. MP should look at your previously faced opponents.
The real problem is far more practical: I have a healthy fear of making changes to the pairing code. MP hit 300 tournaments in October and modifying pairing code is good way to break a decent chunk of those tournaments.
The solution is simple: Write tests for the pairing code so the risk of breaking things goes “almost certain” to “pretty darn difficult”.
Only trouble: Writing these tests is pretty time-consuming. If anyone likes writing tests and wants to help out…
This is a big one for us, too. In our city 15-30 players are the usual numbers and we never use the queue feature. 80pc of the screen devoted to empty queues looks silly. A big screen view which cycles thru each arena’s scores would be awesome. It’s a meeting point where people tend to stand around and chat to each other about the scores they are seeing on the screen, especially towards the end of qualifying, it creates a lot of excitement.
@onetaste I know it! The good news is that I’m working on card/ticket based best game tournaments right now and as part of that work I’ll make it possible to disable queues completely (because card-based won’t support queues).
The bed news is that I’m progressing very slowly because of Real Life™ obligations. It is coming!
Wow, they are the two highest priority features that I want from Matchplay, that is fantastic news! Totally understand re life getting in the way. Thanks!!!
We’ve been using it as sort of a replacement for Brackelope in our local 3-4 strike tournaments and it seems to be going very smoothly. It’s a better platform-agnostic alternative than having to bust out the iPad, and it’s cool to see who can potentially still receive a bye if there are an odd number of players.
My question has to do with the tiered Swiss pairing functionality. I am organizing a league in Eugene, OR and it’s based off of the SFPD league (group play, 7,5,3,1, etc.) but I am hoping to use the tiered Swiss pairing for our league instead of random placement due to huge variance in skill level. Will tiered Swiss pairing support an 8-meeting season?
It depends a bit on how you have your sessions setup. If each session is a separate tournament in a series, swiss pairing will not look at the entire series, just the current tournament. So if that’s the case, you can’t use swiss.
If each session is a new round in a single tournament there’s nothing stopping you from using tiered swiss but I would argue against it.
Tiered swiss requires at least 16 players so if your league is small you risk ending up in a situation where you can’t start the next round. You should use swiss over tiered swiss if anything.
Not every player will show up to every session so your standings won’t be a reflection of true skill until the very end anyway
Honestly, I’d just go with “balanced” to make sure most players plays most other players. With 8 sessions each player will have 24 opponents so I’m betting most people would get to play most other people.
We have an insane variance in skill level at SFPD from Andrei Massenkoff to IFPA rankings in the 6000 range. We have only ever used “random” pairings. Don’t stress it, everyone still has fun.
I should do a write-up of how SFPD uses Match Play. It’s a little unorthodox but could be useful to show how you can “hack” Match Play to work in non-obvious ways (e.g. SFPD has each session as a one-round tournament in a series)
Broadcast display: I don’t know the first thing about broadcasting pinball tournaments, but I’ve added a broadcast display for your tournaments so you can display game data into a broadcast. You’ll find your broadcast link on the Tournament Overview page. Not available for Best Game tournaments because I don’t know what data to display.
More series stats: I added more attendance stats for tournament series because I got tired of calculating things by hand for SFPD. It’s max/min/mean/median attendance for a series.
@haugstrup: Thanks again for designing and refining such a useful piece of software. With each subsequent tourney or event that I run or that I participate in, I notice the improvements and features you’ve added.
Love the “Player Progress” chart in each player’s Statistics section. One suggestion for improvement: is it possible to have the chart auto-scale the y-axis to a range that matches the player’s range in ranks that they had?
@Snailman I could autoscale the y-axis but I’d love to know a bit more about why you’d want such a change? Right now graphs in the same tournament have the same scale so you can compare them as you click between different players. If the y-axis was autoscaled it becomes impossible to compare two graphs.
Interesting. I completely understand why you’d want to not auto-scale it then. I was using the graph for a different purpose of only looking at the trend for one player at a time, and not caring about comparing between two players.
Here’s another idea to add to the list for consideration of unnecessary, but cool features to add:
For match play events, in the Standings table, include a +X or -Y to the right of a player’s name showing how many positions they moved from the prior round. Even better if the + values are color-coded green, and the - values are colored red. Something in the similar vein of how the IFPA rankings table shows Spots Moved.
And once again, Andreas, you rock!
For any tourney organizer who is late to the MatchPlay software party, use this platform without hesitation.
I’d love to do such a +/- feature. I have to figure out a way for it to not be confusing because the standing page updates live (e.g. points earned in a half-finished round counts) but a +/- indicator only makes sense if it compares completed rounds only.
I also have to make the standings calculations faster (or cache them). They are the slowest calculations done right now – especially when using any kind of automatic tiebreaker. A +/- indicator would mean that standings have to be calculated three times instead of once (standings after two latest completed rounds plus standings including the in-progress round).
On a more serious note, as a player, I wouldn’t see much value in partial-round statistics that only make sense in the context of discrete, finished rounds.
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