If you have a mix of EM’s and Early SS, and not enough of each to hold their own separate rounds (this was our situation), then you simply call your EM’s a Solid State as their category.
I also called Banzai Run a “DMD” because it was our only late SS, and it plays long similar to a DMD era pin.
So I’m glad that the era category selection is flexible vs being hard-coded in from info from ipdb, for instance.
I think someone already mentioned this (and I’m sure Andreas has), but the IFPA Results auto-completing feature with comma delimiters is outstanding. You have to do a little bit of shuffling based on the A finals, but this feature saves a LOT of time.
I’ll get there! Everybody is requesting this so be certain that I’ll get it added in. I’ll start with Match Play Live
Yeah, this is such a pain right now. My plan is to change things so you can create as many “finals” as you want instead of right now where you can only create one finals tournament. It requires some shuffling around in the database first which is why I haven’t done it yet.
I’m happy you are using the categories creatively. I just told someone else yesterday a similar thing: He has certain games that can’t be played together due to the physical placement in his game room. For his next tournament he’ll just mark the games as being in different categories (any category) so he can have MP avoid pulling those games in the same round.
Eventually I’ll make the categories user-configurable but I want to hear how people use them before I start changing the code around.
Just have a few questions and comments regarding my experiences using matchplay.events in the past month or so:
Group knockout
Used the group knockout format this Sunday for one of our annual tournaments and went quite smoothly! It’s very nice to be able to add players and adjust strikes in the case of a scorekeeping error. Was nice that several people could be reporting results on their phones. By the time I figured out how to give players a link to check stuff on their phones it was too late, but I did put the “big screen view” up on our projector and players seemed to appreciate it.
Some players didn’t like that it started from the bottom to make 3 player groups (swiss seeding), but I personally think that is fine, and haven’t heard an alternative suggestion that would be better.
Emailed @haugstrup early on in the tournament to ask if how many “wins” you had had any bearing, or whether players in a 4 player group who had guaranteed themselves the 2nd highest score could just go ahead and drain. Andreas responded to my email with his answer (# of wins don’t matter, they can just drain) before the end of the current round. Now that’s customer service!
An auto-update function like the one on the big screen view would be nice for the entire app. It’s not a big deal to refresh your browser every once in awhile, but with multiple scorekeepers things just get a little confusing sometimes.
Knockout "half wins"
Notice while mucking around in the different formats that the regular head-to-head knockout format has the option of awarding players a “half win” for a bye. Sounds like it could be a cool idea, but I was unable to determine exactly how or if it was functioning in a test run. Curious how this function works.
Match play
We’ve also been using the match play format for our new monthly battle at Superelectric. It has been a huge part of helping us run of our smoothest and most fun tournaments yet! Highly recommended.
We’ve only run into a couple minor snags: On some people’s phones, the website is being displayed incorrectly to the point that they are unable to use them to check matchups. I don’t remember exactly what model they were using, but if it helps I can take note of that info next time it comes up.
It’s also a little confusing that when viewing your own matchups on matchplay live, it doesn’t display the proper player order. Ultimately it just ends up being more convenient to just scroll through the main list of matchups until you see your name and go by that.
Any complaints above are very minor! Thanks to Andreas for making it much easier for us to run our events!
I was even responding from my phone while doing scorekeeping and playing in SF City Champ!
City Champ exposed some pretty annoying performance issues with large tournaments and automatic tiebreaking turned on. Tonight I have made a handful of improvements that will make the Match Play Live standings page much faster for everyone. That’s the page every. single. player. refreshes over. and. over. and. over.
I’ll get there eventually. It’s all a little complicated. I did do a stopgap update a couple of hours ago. You can now append ?refresh=60 to any Match Play Live URL and have the browser automatically update every 60 seconds. Any number above 30 seconds will work.
This is primarily because we had trouble updating the scores on the broadcast at City Champ. I’m not sure how useful it is generally. Example: 2015 City Champ • Standings • Match Play Live
In head-to-head match play a win is 1 point and a loss is 0 points. Normally a bye gives you 1 point, but if you opt for the “half win” option a bye only gives you 0.5 points. That’s all there is to it.
Hit me up at play@matchplay.events with a screenshot (or just a photo of the screen) and the phone model. Would love to get those issues fixed!
There was a temporary problem with this in the past week, but I should have fixed it Thursday evening and all should be good again. I am planning to re-use the “game display” from the “matches” page because there’s really no reason why it should look any different on the front page…
I’m happy you are getting good use out of MP in Cleveland!
I know the player order bug is something @haugstrup knows about as we found that at a tourney here that he participated in as well so I am guessing that’s already being fixed. Glad you got to use it - we used it for City Champ which was a PAPA Circuit event this weekend and it went well!
Should have been more clear about my question. In what way would it affect a head-to-head knockout, since all that is being accounted for are losses? I was thinking that maybe it would be able to reduce the advantage given to people who get random byes in some way.
Knockout tournaments use the points behind the scenes so a person with a half win bye would be placed below someone with no byes and the same amount of strikes.
But that doesn’t make any sense so I think I’ll be removing the “byes” configuration option for knockout tournaments. I don’t know why I haven’t done so already
Huh, I thought it made perfect sense. If two players are eliminated in the same round, one with a 5-3 record and the other with 4-3 and a bye, surely the 5-3 player deserves a higher rank?
If you remove the half-win option for byes I’ll just have to manually adjust the results.
Only problem I can think of is that it’s not fair to give someone a lower rank as punishment for getting a bye, which they have no control over. If it really felt important to me to break a tie, I’d probably have a playoff.
Dang byes! Maybe it would be cool if you could have it group the bottom 3 in a round together, and only give the lowest score a strike. Or when there are only 3 people left with identical records, make them play as a 3 person group with the bottom score getting a strike.
This punishment is pretty small compared to the benefit of receiving a bye. A player with 4-3 and a bye will still be ranked higher than a player with 4-3 and no bye.
I like your idea of playing a 3-player game as an alternative to a bye.
love the MatchPlay software! i am now a subscriber. used it again for a Best Game/Launch Party last night and it worked great. the software is very intuitive for Scorekeepers, which as a TD saves me headaches.
my minor questions/suggestions/comments:
Player Names - a Player’s name was misspelled during registration and the only way to fix it was to Deactivate the Player and make a new player submission to the tournament. is that correct?
Vanity URL - noticed these are 1-time use only. would be nice to reuse the same vanity URL for a venue, location, name of tournament, etc.
Big Screen View - the ability to customize the Big Screen View would be the biggest improvement for me at this point. even though players can access scores via the MatchPlay Live site, it is nice to see ‘Arena’ Scores listed on the big screen in a Qualifying/Best Game format, rather than simply point totals. This is even more relevant at a Launch Party where there is only 1 game being played.
for player names, you can actually go to the main page for the admin (not your tournament page) and click “Players” and edit there - that’s where you can add an IFPA # too (I’ve done lots of tournies with first timers, and after they are in IFPA I go in there to add their IFPA # so future submissions are easier to enter with the IFPA # already included)
Related, a good thing to do is if you have newbies (my focus is to bring in new players, personally), once the results hit IFPA, you can go in and look at who was listed as “Not Rated” and then add in their IFPA # so if they show up at future events, since they are already in your login on MatchPlay their IFPA #s will be there. Not a necessary thing, but otherwise I used to forget until I had the results ready to submit to IFPA and then would add them in and re-generate the IFPA results. I’m just anal about keeping things in order up front so I do this…
