Match Play Events: The Next Generation

General
#1

About a year ago I started working on the next version of Match Play in earnest. Progress hasn’t been as fast as I hoped for two reasons: This past year has been quite stressful due to… the world and it turns out Match Play is a complicated app that can do a lot.

Back in May I shared a couple of videos on Facebook to show what I was working on. I thought they may be interesting to people here and I figure I could use this thread to share more videos of what the next version of Match Play is going to look like.

Video #1: Entering match results
Two things have long bothered with with the current way you enter match results: You can’t save partial results (have to wait until the entire match is finished) and you always have to pick players from 1st through 4th even though you often know the 4th place finisher first. MP will switch to a matrix like in this video where you can enter results in any order and save partial results (don’t worry, you can still click the names on the left):

Video #2: Changing player order
The drag-and-drop solution for switching player order has always been quite janky and I want to get rid of that in favor of a solution that only uses clicking.

This video also shows off the new “inspector” that shows up on the right hand side. You’ll be able to use this to see details about a game/player/machine/etc without having to leave the page you’re on.

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#2

Video #3: Create tournament
And now for a new video. The “Create tournament” screen in Match Play is very intimidating. With each new feature, it has just grown and grown. The new version will be much simpler where you only have to enter the most important details.

After you have created your tournament, you will then be able to change each setting individually. This should make things a lot simpler for those tournaments where you just have to change one or two settings. You no longer have to look at an endless field of dropdowns to find the one setting you want to modify.

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#3

Looks like some good enhancements can’t wait to try it out.

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#4

Looks fantastic Andreas! Thanks for all your effort on this. Using it for so many tournaments its great to see these improvements.

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#5

Oh hell yeah! Thanks Andreas!!

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#6

My next event is 3/20 if you need a beta tester.

#7

I will definitely be soliciting for testers as soon as I can, but it will be much later than 3/20. There are still missing pieces before you can run a successful tournament. Like, right now you can only add players already in the system – there’s no way to add a new player :cold_sweat:

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#8

Video #4: Create and edit series
One of the more common support emails I get are requests to edit tournament series because it’s not possible to make any changes after you’ve created the series. So if you picked the wrong scoring option or made a typo in the name your only option is to email me.

In the interest of saving everyone time the next version will make it possible to edit series. :partying_face:

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#9

I also noticed that if you create a series that you have to use the same playoff scoring as the series. So if a IFPA 7,5,3,1 in your series when you create playoff it doesn’t allow you to switch to a 4,2,1,0. That would be helpful too for our league I just always create a new playoff tournament.

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#10

Video #5: Scorbit scanner
Much of my time on the next version of Match Play is rebuilding features that already exist in the current version. This week I gave myself a little treat and added the first integration with @scorbit.

Clicking the QR icon opens a QR code scanner. This scanner can read QR codes generated by Scorbit. In the video I’ve printed the QR code on a random piece of paper, but in real world the QR code would be placed on the pinball machine itself.

After you scan the code, Match Play will go fetch the machine and venue information from Scorbit so you know you’re dealing with, for example, a Police Force machine located at Free Gold Watch in San Francisco.

If this machine is not in your tournament, you can add it with a single click. If the machine is already in the tournament you can go directly to that arena (and the TD can deactivate/active the machine).

This is just scratching the surface of how Match Play and Scorbit will integrate. We have some pretty awesome plans for how to speed up scorekeeping and just share data between the platforms.

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#11

::rubs hands together::

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#12

Oh been waiting for this type of integration with Scorbit and Match Play. Looking forward to these features and how they can be integrated to save time in entry of scores in the platform.

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#13

Video #6: Flip player order
Something small that I’ve always missed. When changing the player order on a match there will be a “Flip order” button to reverse the player positions. For all those cases where players are listed by seed but picking the opposite play order.

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#14

YES!!! I always have to do that manually for our playoff rounds, you are awesome!!!

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#15

If I could add more than one like/heart to this, I would flood it with likes.

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#16

This is the way!!!

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#17

Video #7: Pending rounds
This is one more thing that bothers me all the time but for various reasons is hard to change in the current Match Play version. In the next version you can edit games in a pending/unpublished round (change arenas or players).

In other words you’ll actually be able to fix things before publishing the round instead of only being able to look at things you wnat to change without being able to make those changes :joy:

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#18

But what if I love hearing the chorus of complaints and confusion when I have to change something after the round starts?

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#19

I’m not in a match!

Why am I first every round!?! (TD checks and they haven’t been first for even the majority of the rounds)

Why do I have to play Monopoly twice in a row?!?

I kinda miss this stuff. Haha

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#20

You mean you don’t have “moaned about playing the same game twice” participation awards? :smiley:

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