Match Play Events Open Thread

General
521

This option works perfectly for us. Thanks! Oh and nice talking with you at Pinburgh!!

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522

Is it possible to remove a player somehow? This past wednesday I had someone show up, play 1 game of 5 and then need to leave for a family issue. I’d like to simply remove them from all the games played so that group gets 3 player 7/4/1 scoring.

523

It’s not possible yet, but it will be at some point in the future. For now you have to adjust points for each game :frowning:

524

Availability notice: I am planning to move Match Play to a new (and faster) server on Monday evening. At most this will involve 15 minutes of downtime, best case around 5 minutes of downtime.

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525

I hope it is going to be a 2am PST work window right? :slight_smile:

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526

I was thinking more like 10pm, but if you’re volunteering to move databases at 2am…

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527

How do I edit points? Is there a means to change the results on the tournament standings page? Here’s the link…

https://matchplay.events/app/tournaments/10627

528

Go to the “players” tab and then the “adjust points” subtab!

529

Aha! Got it taken care of. Thank you sir, yet again, for your stellar service.

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530

So 1 AM my time :wink: . We will be wrapped up with our weekly knockout by then.

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531

Weekend update: Much easier Slack integration

This weekend I redid the Match Play <-> Slack integration. If you gave up on this in the past because the setup was wayyyyyyyy too complicated I will urge you to try again. Added MP to your Slack team is literally now just two clicks of a button.

If you don’t already have a Slack team for your local pinball community, you can create a free team at https://slack.com/ – it’s a great way to chat with fellow pinheads. In the Bay Area we use a Slack team to chat about pinball locations, discuss tournament rulings and organize tournaments and events. And of course to get game notifications from Match Play!

After you have your Slack team head to https://matchplay.events/live/users/notifications and slick the “Add to Slack” button. Easy!

(The new integration also comes with slash commands so you can easily get IFPA data and search tournaments directly from your Slack team.)

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532

Hi Andreas, I know I asked about this before but I am still confused.

Regarding Player Order, I have been using matchplay.events/live for display on our big screen to read off the order for the groups, this should match the phone (I believe.) However sometimes, like when I draw a new arena it may change the order for other groups? Also, I would like for Big Screen view to be the default view i can use, but the order will be different from player’s phones. Anything I’m doing wrong to help make this easier for me?

533

With player order: You get different results on the big screen view and match play live when you use a player order that could involve ties. E.g. if you’re using “current tournament position” as the player order. I see that you’re also doing swiss pairings which will make this even more apparent because you are ensuring that people who are tied are playing each other.

Unless you’re super into having the current tournament position determine player order, just switch to e.g. “balanced” for player positions and the big screen view and match play live will always show the same player order.

The underlying problem is that I have two separate systems running the show. Match play live is one and the big screen view is another.

I will eventually be redoing the big screen view to get rid of this problem (and many others), but it’s going to be a while before I get to it. If you use the big screen view extensively, I recommend switching to a different setting for player positions.

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534

Server upgrade: Done. Let me know ASAP is something seems off.

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535

Thanks. Will switched to balanced for player positions.

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536

For some context, that you may not know about or only be slightly aware of.

When I started playing pinball in 2013 most tournament were running on Brian Smith’s matchplay software that was an iOS app which was the de-facto format used in a lot of mid-atlantic pinball tournaments, especially the monthly masters series.

The software would always use current tournament position for player order, with the caveat that tiebreaker points would make it so that almost 0 players were tied. All groups would receive between .1 to -.1 “bonus” points based on the group they were playing in after round 1, and this was used for all tiebreakers in group seeding as well as overall standings before finals started.

A lot of my pain points in implementing your software in local leagues are that players are so used to running things EXACTLY how they were in Brian’s software, which I really doubt you have ever encountered over in the bay area. Players in my league assume that everything will run exactly as it did on this other software, and get frustrated when it doesn’t.

537

(my apologies for mentioning an alternate offering in Andreas’ thread)

The FSPA/PAPA League Manager system has pretty good support for crazy stuff like this. It can’t handle everything, a few formats just don’t jive with its internal structure, but leagues are welcome to give it a look… worst case, I’ll tell you that I can’t help you. (Despite that, I do try to encourage leagues to rationalize their formats… earning a league score of 24.671 is just awkward for many people.)

And that’s all I’ll say about that here. :slight_smile:

538

Players can be fickle for sure.

You’re right that I don’t know Brian’s software. I was barely playing pinball in 2013!

Alternative: If you turn on automatic tiebreakers those should be taken into account for player positions and you should end up with fewer ties. You can still end with a few though. Especially combined with swiss pairings.

I agree 100% with @joe that awarding 24.671 points is bonkers.

Prediction: In 3 months none of your players care anymore. :slight_smile:

539

Hi Andreas,

I am new to running tournaments, having just completed running my first dozen with Match Play. I’m a big fan of the product, thank you! I have three questions, if you please.

  1. In a weekly 2-strike tournament, we almost always end up with a tie for 4th place. No problem there with IFPA results, but my players get the choice of calling it a draw and splitting the 4th place money, or playing one more game, winner take all. So far no one has ever chosen to split the money. :slight_smile: I usually manually randomize an arena for the tiebreaker, ie, ask a random person to pick a number from 1 to 12… what would be great is a button somewhere that lets me “Select Random Arena” from all arenas left in the tournament that are not otherwise being currently used. No results need to be tracked, just toss me a random arena.

  2. Is there support or planned support for “banks of games” that the highest seeded player in a group can choose between? This is a thing happening in tournaments out here, and I find it fun. Highest seed is presented with a list of banks of 3 or 4 games, and they choose which bank their group plays that round. A specific bank may only be selected once by a player per entire tournament, so banks can remain sticky between rounds, while allowing for substitutions in case of malfunction. First through fourth on each game get 4-2-1-0 points, and the bottom two players get knocked out each round. The folks running this format are doing it with pen and paper. I would love to do this with Match Play.

  3. I’m a premium member of your app. Is there anything stopping me from running selfie-type tournaments for things other than pinball? I know a group of geographically-dispersed people that are way into the Vectrex home game console from 1982 (Vector graphics forever!!), and I have thought about setting up selfie-style monthly tournaments for this group of people. Objections or issues with that?

Thanks for all your hard work on this!

Doug

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540

This would be a great thing to be added to the feedback forums: https://matchplay.uservoice.com/
The feedback forums are there just for these suggestions so other people can vote on their favorite ones and I can gauge interest.

This may be a little too niche to get a high priority from my hand… I usually do what you’re already doing. I have a random number generator app on my phone so I don’t have to have someone yell out a number, but same difference :slight_smile:

This answer is a little more complicated.

The tournament format is definitely supported. In MatchPlay terms what you’re describing is a “group elimination bracket” so just choose that as your tournament format and you’ll be all set with the “groups of four; top two advance” format.

Where it gets tricky is with the tournament banks. MP does have a “machine banks” feature, but it’s an automated thing where MP will assign a bank to a group.

You have options though:

  1. You can disable arenas in MP entirely and keep running machine choice on paper.
  2. You can set “arena draws” in MP to the “manual” setting. After the top seed has made their bank choice you just have to manually select each arena in MP. It’s a little extra clicking, but unless you have a massive tournament it’s totally doable. We did this for San Francisco City Champ two years ago. It’s much faster to do if you have a laptop rather than just a tablet.

You should totally run as many tournaments as you want! The majority of tournaments on MP are pinball tournaments, but people use the software for several other “sports” (like Super Smash Bros). The more the merrier! Let me know at play@matchplay.events if there’s anything I can help with!

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