The preferred arena feature is only available for certain tournament formats. I’m guessing you’re planning to run a format where it’s not supported?
Running a classics tournament this weekend, and there are a few areas in my arcade that have a high concentration of classic games. What I want to do is spread out the randomly selected games each round so that there aren’t 7 four player matches going on in one small room.
I thought I could do this with categories, but it doesn’t seem like it.
Games that are in areas with enough space around them could be in every round, but there are other spots where half of the games could be used in one round, and then the other half could be used in the next round.
So basically, at the beginning of the round, I want to choose which “bank” is being used, and the arena draws will come from that bank. Something like:
Bank 1
Paragon
Black Knight
Space Time
Playboy
Wizard
Doodle Bug
Bank 2
Paragon
Black Knight
Space Time
Captain Fantastic
Prospector
Frontier
Is there a way to do this? I swear I’ve been in tournaments that do something like: this round is EMs, the next round is SS, the next round is modern, repeat.
Why won’t categories do this? Call one bank A and the other B. Draw from A round one, then B round 2 and so on.
Okay, yes…they do.
I tried this the last time I ran this format, and was getting an error message (that I can’t remember now) so it was unusable. But…I ran a test tournament just now and it worked.
Under Category Banks in the matchplay documentation, it says: “Category banks only really make sense when the tournament is configured to have more than one game per round” and I guess that statement seemed to support it not working for me previously. So, I would respectfully disagree with the documentation!
Thanks Erik!
1 Like
That’s apples and oranges. Category banks is different from drawing exclusively from one category every other round.
Category banks will use arenas from different categories for each match within a group. So group 1, game 1 will come from category A and group 1, game 2 will come from category B and so on. If you only have one match per round then all groups will get an arena from category A. That’s not really what anyone wants hence the warning.
When you start a round you can limit the arenas used to a single category but that’s a separate filter that’s applied before the arena assignment algorithm starts doing its work
Delayed reply, but I have used labels to try to address this.
You have three sets of machines
Set 1
Playboy
Wizard
Doodle Bug
Set 2
Captain Fantastic
Prospector
Frontier
Set 1 and 2
Paragon
Black Knight
Space Time
In the Labels section of the Area, I add Set 1 to the six machines and Set 2 to the three others plus the three that are also in Set 1.
Then, when I do the draw I draw against the label.
Since only the first label shows up for display, when I did this I had 5 New, 5 Mid, and 5 Old machines. I made the Mid labels all ‘Mid, Old, New’.
When I drew rounds, I either did Old or New and then I had 10 machines available, 5 of which were available every round.
Hi there.
Would there be any way to add an option to Max Match Play format that, if selected, would allow it to use the automation feature in the Flip Frenzy format?
Thanks.
What automation feature are you talking about?
My apologies. I was referring to the queue system where you can set a percentage of the participants to be in the queue and where the winner of each matchup becomes the second player in the next matchup and the top of the queue becomes the first player and the loser goes to the bottom of the queue. I know this is the main feature of the frenzy format, but since no one really uses that due to the IFPA penalty for frenzies, it would a nice feature to add to the max match play format in Match Play.
That would just turn MMP into FF. You should just play a FF if that’s what you want…
For what it’s worth: MMP and FF are very similar in popularity. MMP is slightly more popular but not by much. There are still plenty of FF tournaments happening out there.
That’s just it. People are using your Max Match Play format to get around the IFPA penalty for Flip Frenzy, but are running their tournaments as Flip Frenzies. This makes the TD’s have to constantly be monitoring the completed matches to assign new ones. Having the automation you developed for the flip frenzy as an option in the max match play format would be extremely valuable.
I agree with Andreas. Just run Frenzies. If you ran MMP for 2 hours, on average you get around 10 games in. If you run a FF for 2 hours, you get close to 20 games in. With the IFPA penalty that still equals 10 total games for WPPRS, except that all of the players get to play double the amount of games with very little waiting around.
Run a Flip Frenzy format in MP, determine the number of matches you want everyone to play externally, remove players from the queue once they hit that predetermined total. Set the timer for well longer than you’ll need. Eventually everyone will hit the match total, be removed from the queue, and you’re done.
Voila, you just ran a Head to Head format using available pairings that have no Flip Frenzy style penalty.
2 Likes