I hear you brother. I’m usually thrilled to get 30M.
Tonight’s updates while I procrastinate working on the next big feature:
- The “big screen view” is now available for free users. No premium subscription necessary any more.
- In certain cases the big screen view would not display the “standings” section. It will now. Thanks for the bug report @PAPA_Doug
- Points adjustments for match play tournaments can now be done in half-point increments
- Delete series: You can delete a series provided you first delete all tournament in the series
- Attach/detach tournaments to/from series. After you have created your series you can now attach more tournaments or detach existing tournament to/from the series. Look for the dropdown menu when editing tournament details
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@haugstrup, would it be possible to offer “1 strike” as an option in “Number of strikes” in knockouts? I’ve tried to emulate something similar for the consolation tourney at our weekly with “group elimination” format, but it’s kind of an un-elegant solution when the # of players doesn’t fit in well with the 8 or 16 player brackets.
I think I assumed people wanting one-strike to play a single elimination bracket instead. Anyway! @ClevelandPinball you can now create one-strike knockout tournaments (group and head to head). Enjoy!
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Thank you!
We’re using Matchplay for a >32 player event with big screen mode tomorrow. Should be fun! I’ll try to report back after.
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Party on! As always let me know if there’s anything I can help with or questions I can answer!
The tournament went really well. We had 38 players and nearly 3 dozen machines.
One comment I did hear time and time again, though, was “I’ve played ______ three times but haven’t played ____, ____, or ____ once!” Since we played 5 rounds of 4, each player played 20 machines, but repeats were really, really common.
I’m happy the tournament went well! What’s the Match Play Live link for your tournament? Then I will look at repeats for you
The code was SCO2016
If you go to the standings page ( https://matchplay.events/live/sco2016/standings ) and click on each player you can see how many times they played each arena. I see that only 4 players played an arena 3 times. With 196 games that seems pretty good to me!
When there are multiple games per round arena selection behaves more like a socialist than a libertarian. E.g. if three players in the group has not played Lost World it matter less that the fourth player has played it already. That’s how you end up with Scott May who has only one repeat game, but he played it 3 times.
Assigning arenas for group play and multiple games per round is pretty much the hardest thing Match Play is ever asked to do. To be sure there the algorithm can be improved* but looking at your tournament the distribution looks pretty good to me – Scott May is the one weird outlier.
Balanced arena assignment will always be a “best effort” type thing rather than a “perfect solution” type thing. In most cases a perfect distribution is impossible and MP would be spending far too long searching for the perfect solution (and you don’t want to be waiting a loooooong time while starting the next round).
Do what I do: Tell players that MP isn’t looking to hurt them specifically. It’s pain agnostic and hurts every player equally. It’ll be someone else playing Lost World 3 times in the next tournament. 
*) All MP’s pairing and balancing code is available at https://github.com/haugstrup/TournamentUtils if you or someone else is curious. It’s an important part of the app so I wanted to make it available to the public – if you want to build you own tournament you can even use the same pairing code MP uses.
For balancing MP generates 1000 random solutions and picks the best one. I do have plans to improve this using some simple machine learning approaches. Just always busy with other features!
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Group knockout question - we enjoyed using match play yesterday for our 29 player 3 strikes event in Columbia MO, but had a conundrum at the end. Two players went out on the last game for second - third places, we thought the software might auto order them based on last game played, but instead showed them tied for second. We tried clicking on the “create playoffs” button, but couldn’t get it to work, so we pseudo randomly picked a game as a second place tiebreaker game.
Love the software,just didn’t know if this was a known issue, and it was contemplated to have ties for those going out at the same time on the same game, and if I failed to somehow use create playoff properly.
It’s expected that a group knockout would work that way. To the software the players were tied for 2nd place. Group knockout never looks at the individual placement, it only concerns itself with number of strikes. Since the players were knocked out in the same round they are tied.
It’s not a bad idea to use the placement in the final match to break the ties. I’ll see if I can’t make that happen.
The “create playoffs” feature will just create a new single elimination bracket tournament and copy over your arenas and players. It’s probably not what you wanted to do in your case
I was the TD at this event. The Matchplay software worked very well. I looked at a handful of players results and what I mostly saw was 2 or 3 pins that were played twice, and the rest only played once. That is the best one could expect, I believe. I did have a few players asking if the pins could be done in “Banks” like Pinburgh, where DMD, SS, EM are represented in every bank. I didn’t see an option for that. Is that possible with Matchplay?
Also, a few complained that the IFPA scoring was unbalanced, but I didn’t see it that way. The only other option is Pinburgh scoring and then you have to deal with those pesky half points in a three player group. Is that how Matchplay deals with Pinburgh scoring on 3 player groups?
Banks
MP doesn’t do banks because it’s very difficult to do software for (even pinburgh has the original game on the scoresheet after replacing a game). MP odes have arena categories and you can restrict arenas drawn to to a specific category. That gives you some freedom to approximate banks. You do have to draw arenas individually for each game right now so it’s a lot of clicking. It’s how we did it for the City Champ playoffs.
I will be working on a few improvements to the category system that’ll make it easier to “fake” machine banks. Look out for improvements in the next month or so.
Pinburgh scoring
MP matches the same scoring used at the actual pinburgh, including those half-points.
IFPA scoring
Is the opposite of unbalanced. It’s completely linear, can’t get more balanced than that!
Let players suggest results
I’ve been working hard this weekend to let TDs relax a bit more during their tournaments. You can now let players suggest results for their own games!
It works like this:
- Players login to their Match Play account and claim their player (this’ll be done automatically for them on subsequent tournaments)
- Players now have a “suggest results” button below all their games. They click this to fill out who took 1st/2nd/3rd/4th and optionall add the game scores.
- You, the TD, will see these suggested results on the “Rounds” tab and you can approve the result if you like it or enter your own if you don’t.
- It’s even possible for scorekeepers to view and approve suggested results.
- This is a free feature available to everyone
Just think about the possibilities! When you’re playing a tournament you no longer have to hunt down the TD to get your results entered. Just fill it out on your phone and order another slice of pizza between rounds. (if you’re smart you’ll enable Slack or SMS notifications and your phone will tell you where to go next).
You’ll find the new configuration option near the bottom of the tournament details form, in the “scorekeeper” section
Best Game / Super Selfie Leagues
But wait! That’s not all! @timmychap had a brilliant idea: Why limit this to match play tournaments? You can also let players submit their own scores on Best Game tournaments. You, the TD, still has to approve the submitted scores of course.
I think this’ll be very useful if you are running a super selfie league. Let your players enter their own scores and now you only have to compare the photos to the scores already entered. Less typing, more pinball!
Match Play Live will even display pending scores so players can see what they need to shoot for even if the TD hasn’t had time to approve scores yet.
For Best Game tournaments players will enter scores on the arena page on Match Play Live and you’ll approve them on the “Scores” tab.
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And finally the free trial is now 90 days instead of 14 days. That way you can try it out for your super selfie league for a couple of months without having to signup for the premium plan. If you choose to upgrade the premium plan will set you back a measly $1.66 per month (less than two games of pinball)
What’s the issue with banks? You’re a better softie than me, but I can think up a couple approaches that shouldn’t be too impossible. I’m not sure how your data structures work, so I’m not going to go suggesting things willy-nilly.
(Of course, the other way is to make each ‘arena’ a bank, rather than a game, which is what I assume you mean by ‘faking’ a bank?)
I wasn’t being clear. What I should have said was “Banks is a ton of UI work and most TDs don’t want banks after all so I can make more people happy by spending my time doing other stuff”. 
From a software dev. perspective I absolutely think the right way to go about it is to treat a bank any other arena. That way the same balancing approach can be taken. Unfortunately for Match Play that would require a lot of UI work (basically repeating all the arena work).
Other than a few locations TD just don’t have the machines available to use banks in a satisfying manner. I actually had support for machine banks on the very first notes I wrote before I started writing code. But no one was using banks so I never started on implementing it!
So far I’ve found that only one or two TDs have gotten in touch talking about banks and been serious (more have asked but just out of curiousity). Most TDs would rather do e.g. a round of EMs, then a round of DMDs etc. because it allows them to control the timing of the tournament better and a machine breaking down doesn’t completely mess up your tournament.
All that hand waving aside: I am trying to find a way to support sort-of banks (multiple games per round with a machines from specific categories assigned to each game in the round). The tricky part there is handling repeat machines (MP usually takes great care in not assigning an arena that’s already in use) and handling situations where the TD doesn’t have enough games to cover all groups (again: You want to assign multiples of the same game in this situation, unlike all other situations)
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Initial Selfie League support has landed in Match Play!
- Players can submit their own scores (including photo) and share their score on Facebook using a “share on facebook” button that shows up right after they have submitted.
- Tournament directors can approve scores without having to do any typing! The photo is shown along with the score. The TD can even see where the photo was taken (to avoid the most obvious cheating).
I’ve put a short guide online along with some screenshots. You can see it here: https://matchplay.events/tournaments/super-selfie-league
Official Selfie Demonstration Photo by @genex. Thank you, Gene!
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