Match Play Events Open Thread

I’m pretty sure it’s frozen. I prefer to hide results so people focus on playing more than where they are in the standings and such but YMMV

does this hide standings and queue in progress? or just standings?

Just standings.

@haugstrup we hit a couple issues with the Flip Frenzy format today, first time we’ve tried it. I think these are bugs based on my understanding of the format but it might be intended.There could be something going on with our number of players or number of machines as well. There don’t appear to be any configurable parameters for this format that would impact pairings or game selection so I don’t think it’s a configuration problem.

Our expectation for FF format:
If a player wins a game, they go back into the queue. If they lose, they remain on the game for one more match and then go back into the queue, win or lose.

What we had happen with Matchplay:

  • Players never played the same game twice in a row. We thought if someone lost a game, they should stay on the game for one more match.
  • Every player played two sequential games and then went back into the queue, regardless of if they won or lost each game. At least I think this is what was happening. Here’s a quick and dirty visual of the game completions for some of the players in the tournament, I think you can see the game-game-skip pattern. This is just a name find on the matches page for a few players, every vertical bar is a different player and the yellow horizontal bars are reported matches they played in.

Other:

  • This format didn’t allow self-reporting of scores. My impression is that this is intentional, but I think we’d prefer the ability for groups to report their scores without checking in. The TD ended up giving everyone access to the machine running the TD matchplay account so they could self-report, but this has the potential to cause more problems. It’s a good idea for everyone to check in after every game with this format but TDs should have the option to allow reporting if they want it.

FYI @Snailman @BuffaloATX @YeOldPinPlayer

You did not experience bugs. The software performed exactly how it was intended. Below are the release notes from @haugstrup

Flip Frenzy is a hectic format I strongly suggest anyone wanting to organize these tournaments create a couple of test tournaments in order to become familiar with all the new buttons. You won’t have time once the tournament clock starts running!

A few implementation notes:

*There are a few variants on how players are rotated out there. MP implements only one: The old Player 1 becomes the new Player 2 and the old Player 2 moves to the back of the queue.

*If you have more arenas available than needed, MP will rotate the arenas for each game. In other words: The newly created game may not be on the same arena as the previous game and you should have both Player 1 and Player 2 report results because the new game will not necessarily be on the same arena.

*Tournament position is determined by number of net wins (number of wins minus the number of losses). Two tiebreaker options are available (“most wins” and “fewest losses”).

*Player score submissions are… complicated. The programming becomes much more complicated since player submitted scores have to be placed in a separate location in the database (since one game finishing results in an immediate new game created it would be pandemonium otherwise).

Additionally the risk of player shenanigans/cheating goes up significantly if players can submit scores without being physically present (like submitting a score before their game is really over).

If you trust your players you could leave your tablet in the hands of the next player in the queue and players can take turns recording results. Then the TD could play in the tournament.

Nice, I missed that post somehow. Now I know what to expect from this point on.

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Ouch with the bolded text. I try to avoid doing that kind of thing because it comes off as very aggressive. I suggest using the quote function or linking to a post. I saw the notes a few months back but hadn’t caught the big caveats there.

I wasn’t running the tournament, just reporting what I thought were problems with the implementation. We’ve hit a significant number of bugs and unexpected corner quirks in the past, @haugstrup has been great responding and addressing plenty of stuff. The way this format on matchplay went did not match any of our expectations going into the event. The TD and assistant TD went through the whole (incorrect) format with all of the players at the start of the tournament and then it didn’t work out that way with the software at all. I don’t know where this variant came from but it was not what we expected, I think I was pretty clear about that.

Either way, good to know. I don’t think I like this variant much - game length is going to be the major determinant (only determinant, really) of queue position. We only had two matches total between the top four finishers in a three-hour tournament and what seemed like a large number of repeat opponents.

Yeah this is only going to be a decent qualifying format, or a cool change of pace casual tournament.

@djreddog already answered your questions so I won’t go through them again :slight_smile:

As much as I’d like to I can’t control what TDs tell their players. Match Play is pretty clear about how the Flip Frenzy will progress. The TD sees the following help text:

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This sort of thing tends to happen, even when using the loser-stays-on variant.

To be fair, @djreddog simply copy-and-pasted text that was already bolded. I really don’t think it was a personal attack.

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@Law, as @LCM stated, I simply copied the documentation from @haugstrup rather than quote it.

However I will add a few things of my own. I think your TD let the players down on this one. I’m running my first Flip Frenzy on 2/2 for 40 people and I have already created and simulated several test tournaments in the MP software. Running these tests beforehand has already allowed me to see what happens when people aren’t present (due to smoke break or bathroom break), how to adjust the size of the queue on the fly and what happens when you disable a machine because it dies on you.

As for the format that MP follows, it’s much easier on everyone let alone the newer players as to what the rules are regardless if you win or lose the match.

As for reporting scores, if you don’t have a dedicated person marking scores that isn’t playing in the tournament, then the suggestion is to have the 2 people who just finished their match walk over together to the iPad/laptop and report the scores because as soon as you do the next match starts.

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I’ll take the blame for that. I had to leave town and was unable to run the event. I knew how FF was implemented but didn’t communicate that to the rest of my team. Sorry @buffaloatx & @law

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And I’m not bashing you or the other TD’s at all. The big thing for Flip Frenzy is that when it was introduced and manually run, it was done using the format of the winner stays at the machine. Then, when @haugstrup wrote the MP software he took a different approach for simplicity sake.

Yeah, I finally noticed that little bit of text somewhere around half way through the tournament.
I believe that I misread some things regarding this format so my explanation was at odds with what/how the software works.
Overall this format is pretty fun and allows for people to play more pinball as opposed to a standard matchplay tournament. Now that I know what to expect from the software we will probably have a few of these events during the up coming year.

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I’m testing out MP for upcoming SCS finals. When doing a single elimination bracket, are you not able to add multiple games per round? That option does not appear for me. I want to be able to show the current score for each match up on the stream…

This is correct. MP has no capability for recording individual results in a best-of-X type of situation. You can “enter scores” to put whatever numbers you want so you could put the amount of games won in there, but those numbers might not show up everywhere

Can we add an option to hide the queue for flipper frenzy formats?

You can disable the queue entirely if you wish, but if the tournament uses a virtual queue that queue will be visible to the players. Why would you want to hide it?

First update of 2019

If you create a new round but chose not to publish it right away you can now make changes to the groups before publishing the round. This includes changing arenas, moving players between groups and changing the player order. It went a little fast this morning so please let me know if there are any actions not working for unpublished groups.

I forget how many people have asked for this but I’m pretty sure @JSwain and @JLemire are among them (maybe’s it’s a New England thing?)

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To eliminate the possibility of shenanigans. My players enter their own results when they are done. There’s risk that they delay their entry of results to avoid a specific opponent.

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