Match Play Events: The Next Generation

Fixed now – sorry about that and thank you for reporting!

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I have been using the following tiebreaker for our league. Most 1st and 2nd, then doing Strength of Schedule for the second tiebreaker. It is a bit painful to do but saves us from doing any one ball or full game tiebreakers, it can still have someone who is tied but is very rare. For the format we are using I don’t find using SOS fair right off the bat, is there any future enhancement to allow to you use two criteria’s for the tiebreaker, would make my life a little easier. Thanks for all you do.

Would it be easy/possible to add a filter to the tournament and series search page for Planned, In Progress, or Completed?

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Thanks @coreyhulse and @chuckwurt. That’s exactly what I needed.

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If there was a built in tiebreaker option for “most 1sts, most 2nds, then strength of schedule” I would also use it as my preferred option.

Text message notification requirements have changed. You must now have a premium subscription in order to setup text message notifications. Let me explain why this change was necessary:

In the old version of Match Play you could receive text message notifications but you’d have to pay for for each message by buying a number of text message credits. So when I got my bill from the mobile carriers I’d have money to pay it with.

But managing these credits was also a giant pain so when I built the new version of Match Play I knew wanted something simpler. I made text message notifications free and decided I’d pay for them out of pocket until I could figure out what to do.

Being free meant that a lot more people have been taking advantage of text messages. It’s no longer sustainable for me to pay for these out of pocket.

For example: In April 2023 Match Play sent ten times as many text messages as the year before! That’s just nuts! On top of that mobile carrier fees have increased and will be increasing again on June 1. My monthly bills have gotten intense and I need to make a change.

So starting right now you must have a premium subscription to setup text message notifications. The good part is that a premium subscription gives you additional features that even people who don’t organize tournaments can enjoy such as much more detailed user stats and the ability to upload a fancy banner image on user profiles.

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IMO makes perfect sense, you should not be out of pocket (or having premium customers subsidize) if there are costs within a free subscription service. I know our players really like the text feature and happy to pay for it included within all the other features in the premium subscription service.

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there are still cell phone plans that don’t have unlimited text and talk? i thought the only thing anyone paid for anymore was data?

you need to pay for Programmable Messaging you can’t just use an basic phone plan for that.

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It would be quite the effort if text message notifications was really just me in my apartment typing out the texts on an iPhone! But yeah, there are both fixed fees to maintain a number for automated messaging and per-message costs to both the processing company (the entity I contact to send messages on MP’s behalf) and the mobile carriers.

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Can’t you have notifications via chrome on your phone like lots of websites, -annoyingly - use? (I deny it any time a website tries to get those permissions, but for Matchplay it would be useful!

I agree it would be useful! It unfortunately also requires complicating the MP codebase significantly (so takes longer to build new features) as well as some buying access to some rather expensive infrastructure. The math hasn’t worked out so far but I do re-evaluate on a regular basis!

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:grimacing: Thank you for adding, although I meant on the Search page… Perhaps it’s not tenable since it’s also for player/series searches? I am still having trouble searching for events and having to scroll through multiple pages past the planned ones.

New subscription plans and pricing update

I’m introducing three new subscription plans for Match Play. A “Pro” plan for tournament players, the “Premium” plan for tournament organizers and a “Patron” plan for folks who rely on Match Play and want to support the service even more generously.

I’m excited to offer a Pro plan for tournament players. This new plan will give players access to detailed stats about your tournament experiences, text message notifications and a few other features for those of you who want to support Match Play but aren’t organizing your own tournaments.

You’ll see that the Premium (and Patron) plan comes with a price increase. I’d like to talk about that a little bit. Match Play has had the same price since it launched way back in 2015! But Match Play is not the same app as it was back then. Today the Premium plan gives you access to 11 premium tournament formats (including the popular Max Match Play), as opposed to the three it launched with. Server costs have also increased substantially over the years (and MP is now handling over 20 times as many tournaments per month as it did in 2015). And I’m spending more time than ever building new features. The new prices reflect the level of support needed to keep Match Play sustainable for the future.

If you have an existing premium subscription, it will not renew. You’ll continue to have access to premium features for the period you have already paid for, but after that point you’ll have to re-subscribe to the new Premium plan. If you don’t want to wait or you want to give extra support to Match Play, you may subscribe early to the new plan.

You can read more on this page

And you can start a subscription to one of the new plans from your billing page

Thank you for supporting Match Play with your premium subscriptions over the years. I literally could not have done it without you. :heart:

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I don’t like the naming of the plans
maybe better to have
basic for free
something like player plus? / pro player? (what you call pro)
Premium (what you have now)
Patron ok now for now but if start adding stuff that not in Premium then maybe adjust the names.

Now maybe if pro did have some of the premium tournament formats over fee then I can see the NAME fitting.

But for something that really just add’s stuff for that one user then the naming maybe should be something that says it’s just for the that user alone.

right now Free / Pro / Premium seems like other software and in that case the pro paid level should over all stuff.

Thank you for your feedback. The billing portal have pretty clear descriptions of what each plan includes. I need plan names that are pretty generic because I will be adding features to them over time.

@nudgey I hear you. I have a couple of week of work in front of me manually stopping renewals on the old premium subscriptions (see above) but after that my next area of focus of “how in the heck do I find my tournament”

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I’m personally glad to see the price increase and a new tier for non TD players to pay for some features. You’ve totally revolutionized the tournament scene by making it easy to run so many types of events. I remember the days of messy spreadsheets and dry erase boards before Matchplay, so whatever it takes for you to keep doing this, I fully support it!

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I think I’ve gotten with Andreas at least once a year asking how I can pay more. Haha

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I recently played Group matchplay for the first time where new rounds were started before the last round was finished.

I want to organize a tournament for 30 players but only 5 pinball machines available. Does this work with Group matchplay similar to Max Matchplay?

Is there anything to consider so that everything works well?