I don’t think so.
Not automatically, but you can start the round and uncheck the publish immediately box. Then look through all the matches and if the two machines you want used are not being used change games one and two to those machines. Then publish the round. It should take less than a minute.
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Sort of. It’s doable, just slows the process of starting each round.
In order to accomplish it you would have to do this:
- Assign your games to A/B/C groups. Group C would include the 2 games upstairs. Group A would include 14 of the remaining 28 and group B would include the remaining 14 games. When you start a round, uncheck “publish”, then always draw games from group C first. From there you have to manually draw arenas for the remaining 8 groups from either group A or B.
I have to do this at my house to space things out. It sucks but it has to happen to space things out.
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If it were Swiss pairing this would make the top players (top 2 groups) always play the 2 upstairs games. To avoid this you could check if both games were assigned for the round. If not then randomly select (using some method) 1 or 2 of the groups that were assigned downstairs games (depending on if 1 or 0 of the upstairs games were already assigned) and manually change them to the upstairs games.
I know this is weird, but is there a desire from others to hide the queue in FF? I was thinking of running a “hardcore” FF where both standings and queue are hidden, but the TD doesn’t play and manages everything.
FF has been a hugely controversial format in my region as of late, because each TD has different tweaks/house rules to the system and there’s various ways to game things like cutting in line to report your result to face a weaker opponent, delaying when you report, etc. Conceding without playing a ball/putting credits in, etc. Hiding the queue would go a long way towards this but would require TD to not play…which I’m fine with as a TD.
There is no such option and I don’t think I would want to spend time implementing such a thing.
In general cheating disappears with one simple rule: Require both players to report the result together to the TD. The two players have conflicting interests (one want the result in so they can get their next opponent, the other may wish to delay to face a different opponent) so when they have to report together they’re kept honest.
Conceding without playing a ball/putting credits in
This is a quick way to cheat yourself into losing the tournament? Maybe consider throwing these people out of your tournament – it should be fairly easy to spot them as they return to play a new game immediately.
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That’s definitely understandable, how about win % for the standings metric then? haha jk uservoice already submitted (and doesn’t seem that popular so oh well)
Re: Getting both players to report, yes I’ve been forgetting to enforce that rule as of late. I’ll do that and see how it goes. It was in my original rules draft but I’ve been lax about it as people have gotten more comfortable with the format.
I’m not sure what the logic about insta-conceding is but I guess if it’s “most wins” and you feed wins to “pros who are going to get in anyways” then maybe it makes sense? I think it’s more possible collusion because you can boost a player into finals/higher up in the standings (wow we Esports now!)…
Flip Frenzy tournaments on Match Play don’t use “most wins” for this exact reason. The tournaments use “Net wins” (number of wins minus number of losses). Conceding a match without playing at all is… ill-advised.
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Not when you figure to lose match or opponent puts up a monster score you don’t think is catchable. Concede and get back in the que for a better chance at more victories and improve standing.
I disagree with this strategy if you want to win. If you want to win you need that player to expend time of their wins. If everyone just conceeds to them, they win the tournament. So you need everyone to do what’s right for the greater good and make them waste as much time as possible because they are good. You can make up ground while they play too long the next game.
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Yeah I do Win-Loss differential but I know there’s some TDs who do total wins. I have yet to play in a total wins FF but I think there’s one coming up in this area, so we’ll see if there’s a concede fest. Might be a lot of worry/theorycrafting over nothing ha
Most of the FF I’ve played in use it for qualifying, which seems to mitigate the “volatility” and “randomness” of the format (and gets the haters to come out haha).
I think that you shouldn’t always give up that quickly especially without playing ball 1-2…some games can have crazy comeback mechanics off 1 ball (CFTBL has Move Your Car or Snackbar Millions, IMDN has tons of points everywhere even skill shots, Munsters has PF multiplier++, etc.)
I personally enjoy playing top players h2h in FF because it forces me to perform better and I learn from watching them in a h2h situation much more than group play.
We have an upcoming event where we are going to have 40 players and 17 machines.
I’ve split the machines into three categories
A: Fastest Playing (7 Machines)
B: Mid (5 Machines)
C: Longest Playing (7 Machines)
The goal is to either have a “Fast” or a “Slow” round.
What would be the better thing to do in MatchPlay?
- Draw a Round with “A” or “C” Machines, and fill in the gap manually for each group with “B” Machines.
- Create duplicates of the “B” Machines and assign them to both “A” and “C” so that every match is assigned a machine.
- Manually change the “B” Machines each round to either “A” or “C” depending on what round we’re drawing next.
What I’m unsure of is if there are not enough machines in the pool to assign every group a machine, how does it choose which groups don’t get a machine, and when you manually draw a machine does it take previous matches into account?
Right now I’m leaning towards the third option. A little bit of overhead per round, but I think the optimal regarding machine assignments.
I would go with the third option, but instead of editing the category of the “B” arenas I would just deactivate the arenas I won’t want to include in a given round. Just because it’s much faster to deactivate/activate arenas than it is to edit categories
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I just submitted a new idea for Matchplay to allow more options for assigning arenas. This would help solve @Gizmonic and @coreyhulse issues, as well as mine. Here is the link to vote:
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I’ve created a webpage based on the API that will allow you to broadcast on a screen who is registered for an event but formatted differently than the MatchPlay Big Screen View.
Last year we ran an event with 50+ people at the York Show, and because of the large number of entries we didn’t announce people’s names at the start. This resulted in a person who had paid but wasn’t entered in the MatchPlay software, and we had to finagle to get them in a group after the round had been drawn.
The normal Big Screen interface lists everyone one line at a time, which is good for normal-sized events but not good if you go over a certain number of people.
I hacked something together for this year’s York show, but I figured I would make it more generic for any event to use. If you add a Chrome plugin for an auto-refresh once every 30 seconds, you will be able to set it and forget it as people self-police whether they were in the Tournament or not.
Example link:
http://pinballspinner.com/matchplayapi/players.php?matchplaylink=summerclassic2019 -> Example MatchPlay event
http://pinballspinner.com/matchplayapi/players.php?matchplaylink=0bbr3 -> Intergalactic 2019
It’s a very boring interface that alphabetizes the players monospaced and crosses out players who are registered but inactive and should be able to fit on whatever screen you’re broadcasting to.
The only formatting option I have added is font size in case you want control over that. I found using the zoom within the browser was good enough, but if you have lots of people (or only a few) you might want to change the font without changing the zoom:
http://pinballspinner.com/matchplayapi/players.php?matchplaylink=summerclassic2019&fontsize=36
variables:
matchplaylink -> tournament_id_or_url_label from matchplay
fontsize -> integer, defaults to 48
I don’t plan on doing much more development of this specifically, so I threw what I did up on GitHub in case anyone wanted to customize it for their needs: https://github.com/coreyhulse/randompinballstuff/
Many thanks to @haugstrup for an AWESOME API that enables anyone to do something like this.
5 Likes
Wow this looks great, I’ll definitely try this out at my next event!
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We have a similar problem in league where after around 30 people all the names no longer fit, so this is great. If anyone does want to continue to develop it in some way, having the names format into columns would be the logical next step IMO.
The problem I ran into was that I didn’t want to manually set a number of “columns” in case a person had a really wide (or narrow) screen, so I figured I would leave it just as a long list of names and word wrap would take care of it. The other thing I tried doing was adding something like str_pad() and add some non-breaking spaces to “fake” the look of a column since the font is monospaced, and it kinda works except when you had a really long name but I ended up having more deadspace than anticipated which caused scrolling for large numbers of names. I’m sure someone with better CSS/PHP skills could figure out a way to make it work.
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I’m doing some testing for a Flip Frenzy I’m running next weekend. I see this error when I try to make the event 5.5 hours long:
Please fill out all required fields. The duration may not be greater than 240.
@haugstrup Can you set this so I can select a value >4 hours?