Ya it is a tough call as our league is a 6 round balanced draw for groups, so you are kinda stuck with whomever you randomly get assigned to. We have the top 16 advance to playoffs but ultimately two lost out to the tiebreaker using this formula. Myself I was 10 seed thou I tied with 6 other people, glad I didn’t get third on that last game in my group or I probably would not have advanced to playoffs, where I eventually won. But removing those tiebreakers saves a ton of time and ease for sure in playoff seeding as well, where it was way to random before.
If it’s Swiss Pairing, I like Automatic Tiebreakers.
If it’s Random Pairing, then # of 1sts and # of 2nds I think is a good alternate. It’s then clear and the player has control over the outcome vs. Automatic where it’s luck of the draw for opponents.
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Funny enough if I used 1&2 like we used last year in this example I would have probably been closer to 5-7 seed with my 3 wins and 1 Second. Not sure I am sold on Swiss for this small of a sample size as well, tough calls here but I really do like the Strength of Schedule tiebreaker.
I haven’t built challenge matches in the new version and I haven’t decided if I’m going to. Challenge matches became super popular in 2020 when IFPA stopped endorsing tournaments, but since then usage has fallen to almost nothing (around 10 per month).
I’d like to find out if they’re not used because people don’t care for how I built them the first time around or if it’s because people don’t want to use that kind of feature, period.
If it’s a feature people really want to use I’m happy to bring them back (with whatever changes are needed), but it’s not worth the effort if it’s only going to be used by 10-20 people every month…
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I’ve always liked the feature. I forget about it most of the year, but find it to be good practice for state championships.
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This is my preference as well. There’s a greater chance of still having a tie when using “Number of 1sts & 2nds”; but for a short tournament with Balance or Random pairings that seems most fair to me. Using 1sts and 2nds means that players know how they can influence their tiebreakers. Improving from 3rd to 2nd is more valuable than improving from 4th to 3rd. A player who always gets at least 2nd will do better than a player who has a mix of 1sts and 3rds. When using the Automatic Tiebreakers (i.e. strength of schedule), the player has no agency at all over their tiebreaker value.
If tournament runtime is really critical, I still like using 1sts and 2nds as the tiebreak setting with a one-ball tiebreaker for any players still tied.
If would be really nice if you could select two criterias for the tiebreakers.
Criteria 1: 1&2 places
Criteria 2: Schedule of Opponents
That would eliminate pretty well all of the tiebreakers.
When searching for a tournament by name, the results are sorted by Date instead of Relevancy – this is making it challenging for people to find the tournament link. Without vanity URLs it is extra challenging. (This is on mobile.)
Thank you for maintaining Matchplay Events!
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Something that I have liked about the new Matchplay is that the dashboard will show tournaments that you are in so long as you are signed in and have your IFPA number linked. Those last two pieces are a bit of a sticking point with new players and the technologically adverse, but I write out the URL on a whiteboard so that if all else fails they can simply type.
I’m still hoping for vanity URL integration though. Seems like it should happen soon.
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Feature request: I’d like to be able to create a playoffs tournament that uses the same arena banks as my qualifying tournament. Right now, if I have a group match play tournament where I’ve setup arena banks, when I create a group elimination bracket tournament it starts in a state where Arena assignment is “Balanced”. I can change the arena assignment setting to Arena banks, but I have to re-enter the bank names and assign arenas to them. That’s a lot of extra clicks to perform.
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Not sure if this info is in an post prior to this (I quickly looked and might have missed it), but does the “next generation” version have someplace that shows the logged in player’s current match (other than having to scroll through the list of matches to find it) and the number of games remaining in the round (without having to look through the list and count them)?
These are two features I use on The Original Software’s info screen and when trying the new and not finding it easily I switched back.
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You can do less counting by first clicking the “Show only: In progress” filter at the top of the round match list. That helps a bit, but definitely isn’t exactly what you’re asking for. I agree that both of those would be great improvements to the new site.
I hear you. Though I do have to point out the old search is also sorted by date. I did try sorting search results in the new system by relevance, but there are so many tournament with similar names that the results felt super random.
The vanity URLs will come back, but in a revamped form.
I am thinking of other ways to get players to tournaments as quickly as possible. No firm plans yet, but thoughts are percolating. In the short term, the best thing to do is recommend your players create their own Match Play account (like @Zaxxoff mentions).
I honestly just plain forgot to add this filter in, but I did it now. Give MP a reload and you’ll see a “Mine” filter next to “In progress” for any round that still have games in progress. Click “Mine” and you’ll see just your matches. The filter only shows up if you’re logged in and you have claimed a player in the tournament.
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Ran a Max Match Play event for my league and the players took a minute to get the hang of it, but once they did they really enjoyed it. This is a follow up to our league that used Flip Frenzy. Everyone felt it was an improvement. Had 21 players in 8 matches which only took us about an hour and a half and only two players who had to do a rematch.
Plan is to do 5 more meetings with each getting added to a running win total and having a mandatory drop of each players’ worst week. Hopefully the longer run will help with all the ties for seeding into finals. For only the results of the first one we had a 9 way tie for 3rd.
The new search feels worse because it’s using an OR between search terms, while the old search used an AND between search terms. Since so many tournament names are similar, putting something like “pinball” or “basement” or “arcade” in your search terms brings back many irrelevant results even if you have some other more unique word in the search as well.
Example:
weeknight pinball on Next Match Play Events - Brings back a lot of things I’m not interested in
weeknight pinball on Old Match Play Events - Brings back exactly what I’m trying to find
I try to work around this by putting out flyers that have a QR code for the tournament and that have instructions telling people to search for weeknight (which happens to be an uncommon tournament title word) or MPB. But some players don’t read flyers or sign up for accounts, so it’s always a bit of a hassle.
I also try to make it easier to find the events by linking them all to the same Series. I don’t think the players are really aware of that, but I find it very useful so I figured I’d mention it for the benefit of other TDs.
If it’s possible to switch Next Match Play Events back to using AND I think that’d at least get it back to being as good as Old Match Play Events search.
Edit: One more trick… when I’m playing in someone else’s tournament and can’t find it, I search for the TD’s name and then go to their list of organized tournaments. This is helpful when I want to check out the arena bank before I’ve been added as a player.
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Tacking onto to this: I’ve heard players say that they would like their names bolded/highlighted on the matches similar to how it was on the old matchplay.
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Thank you for the feedback. New MP is indeed using a new way of doing searches (for performance reasons). In the new MP searches are done using a FULLTEXT index which is faster than the old way and has a bunch of different ways of searching.
You can still get exact matches of a phrase, but just like on google you have enclose your query in quotation marks. So “weeknight pinball” gets you the results you want: Match Play Events
I understand that’s probably too nerdy for regular humans. I’ll see if I can’t figure out a way to improve things.
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The yellow highlight works the same as in the old version! Unless you found a spot where I forgot to add it in 
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