Match Play Events: The Next Generation

[coreyhulse]

We ran our first Max Match Play last night.

• 10 Games
• 22 Players
• 9 Machines on location (Mostly moderns + Quicksilver, but Quicksilver took a bath 2/3 of the way through)
• When we got down to 5 active matches, we drew new opponents
• Like Germain’s post, it took a bit to get everyone on next.matchplay but once they were there it was good
• 110 games took 3-ish hours, while a Frenzy of similar timing would be 2 hours and a five round match-play would be 2.5 hours

What I liked:

• Good feedback from people on next.matchplay
• People can log their own results
• No repeat opponents
• I was worried about a “long tail” of players needing to catch up at the end, but everyone wrapped up nearly at the same time
• Was still some chaos, but not at frantic as a frenzy itself
• Stats page was awesome to let me see who was eliminated and who had a shot still. Players liked it as well.

What needs work:

• I think you definitely need more games than player-pairs if you want better efficiency - Railroad (our venue) only has 9 games, and Quicksilver went down about 2/3 of the way through
• We had 22 players, so there was always 4-6 people waiting for a match which dragged things out
• It would be nice if the big board was in alphabetical order
• It would also be nice if the Refresh rate on the big board was less than 60 seconds - I would draw a round and we’d have to wait up to a minute to see new matches unless I manually refreshed it
• No “queue” visible on the big board so we had to read names out-loud of people on the “bench”
• We ended up with a 5-way tie for 3rd (all people at 7-3), so we needed to run a play-in

Overall, fun to try a new format and we had a raucous pre-christmas crowd which made it fun in my view.

[JoeTheDragon]

need to test with an odd number of players

[diehardpinball]

I run into the same issue with the next Flipper Frenzy big screen view as well, the refresh rate is too slow for that kind of format, in fact even for our regular match play it would be nice for it to be at 10-15 seconds refresh rate for all formats on big screen view. As well for FF be nice to have more groups in view like the old software I know it scrolls now but it is a bit difficult to view and I usually turn the scrolling off as people have a hard time finding their game as they need to wait for the scroll.

[hisokajp]

@coreyhulse

We ended up with a 5-way tie for 3rd (all people at 7-3), so we needed to run a play-in

i used the built it “player strength” tie breaker for my event, no time to run actual games

[coreyhulse]

@JoeTheDragon

need to test with an odd number of players

When Andreas and I were exchanging messages about the format, we worked through the possibilities.

• Even Players / Even Rounds → No Odd-Person Out Problems
• Even Players / Odd Rounds → No Odd-Person Out Problems
• Odd Players / Even Rounds → No Odd-Person Out Problems
• Odd Players / Odd Rounds → You get a single person who can’t play their final match

Andreas even built in a warning about this:

[JoeTheDragon]

so an even that says we will have an Odd number of Rounds will be forced to add / remove an round?
Can’t play with an Odd number of players?
Forced to add an fake player to make it happen?

I see one place planing to try this at 15 rounds so that may fail on them.

[haugstrup]

Alright, I’ve been taking some time off the computer. Let’s see if I can cover everything

@jay

Any chance next.matchplay could have a feature to fully delete players from the player list instead of (or in addition to) flagging them inactive?

If you go to your global list of players you can “retire” a player and that player will not show up anywhere. You can’t delete the players because that would ruin old tournaments that need to be able to display the player.

The new version of MP hides retired players from your global list (unlike the old version) so they’re even more hidden there.

@Zaxxoff

Vanity URLs are pretty nice to help people quickly find the tournament

I agree! To switch vanity URLs over they will all start to redirect to the new version of MP. That’s something I’ve been reluctant to do so far, but I think it’s time soon.

I will be reworking the feature first though. I was never super happy with how vanity URLs worked in the old MP and will be making some changes to make them more flexible.

@Zaxxoff

The alert when trying to add games “From Location” confuses me regarding Scorbit. None of the games at our location have Scorbit installed. Can we still use this feature by spuriously putting the logo on our Pinball Map listing? Not really interested in false advertising, so the logo isn’t going on the page, but I wanted to understand what has changed here?

This is confusing and that’s my fault. I will be re-doing this flow to make things more clear. Scorbit uses data from the Pinball Map under the hood so all your machines can be found even if you don’t have Scorbitron hardware installed in any of them.

You can pretend the Scorbit logo is a Pinball Map logo. Find your location on MP using the search function and then your machines should show up in the “from location” tab (if they’re listed on Pinball Map).

But yeah, I’ll be making this more clear in a future update.

@dri

I ran a Pingolf tourney yesterday where I wanted to create a top four player playoff (10% out of 40 players per IFPA requirement) but it wouldn’t let me (I selected “other” and it started to cry that at least 6 were required and 8 was the lowest in the dropdown). We ended up doing pen and paper but I realized now I could just have created a new pingolf tourney with 4 holes on it. I must be misunderstanding something.

This may be one of the fights I have to give up on. In my brain four player group bracket tournaments make no sense since no players are being eliminated. But it’s been almost 8 years and people still want create these tournaments.

@dri

I used the new registration function for this tourney and it worked out well. There were some complaints about not being able to remove your own registration, I’m sure there’s a reason for that.

There’s not really. Why did people want to delete their registration?

@dri

I was also registering people on site who wanted to get on the waitlist and I was expecting the same dialog as you would “Add Players” as you would add registrations when in TD mode.

Creating a registration is different than adding a player because registrations can have requirements like the custom questions you can ask of every registrant. But you can register a player by finding their user account and that streamlines the process somewhat.

@coreyhulse

I’m sure oEmbed/OpenGraph is low on your priority list but TiltForums is saying it’s can’t render a preview

This is on my list, but I admit it’s very far down the list

@coreyhulse

• It would be nice if the big board was in alphabetical order
• It would also be nice if the Refresh rate on the big board was less than 60 seconds - I would draw a round and we’d have to wait up to a minute to see new matches unless I manually refreshed it
• No “queue” visible on the big board so we had to read names out-loud of people on the “bench”

On the list of improvements to make!

@JoeTheDragon

so an even that says we will have an Odd number of Rounds will be forced to add / remove an round?
Can’t play with an Odd number of players?
Forced to add an fake player to make it happen?

Do NOT add a fake player. It can really result in some unfair results.

If your event has an odd number of games played and you end up with an odd number of players you should adjust the number of games played instead. Decide if you’re going to add or remove a round in case of a odd number of players and tell people (and IFPA) ahead of time.

Or even simpler: Always play with an even number of games played. Problem solved.

[haugstrup]

@umbilico

Thanks for the info. I think if showing tie breaking scores is not even an option, that will make the switch a lot harder for a bunch of communities. There are big parts of Europe that have been playing Swiss since long before matchplay.events was around, and every software that has ever been used for this purpose showed some variation of Buchholz in the standings.

The only reason it might look like a weird magic number that needs a lot of explaining is that legacy matchplay shows two different tie breaking scores at the same time. If it just used Median-Buchholz by default (or maybe made it a setting which calculation to use instead of showing both), it would be very easy to explain:

Ah, missed one. I think I’ve figured out how to display the tiebreaker numbers in a way where the numbers can be explained. I’ll get it implemented, but I can’t say when.

While the numbers may be easy to explain for Europeans who only play HTH swiss tournaments, keep in mind that MP supports over a dozen different tournament formats with many different tiebreaking numbers used. I have to make something that works for all of them!

[bclement]

@haugstrup

You can pretend the Scorbit logo is a Pinball Map logo. Find your location on MP using the search function and then your machines should show up in the “from location” tab (if they’re listed on Pinball Map).

For my location, Pinball Map and the Scorbit-powered list in MP are not aligned. The Sync Scorbit button doesn’t change anything. Is this an issue with Match Play, Pinball Map, or Scorbit?

[tommyv]

@haugstrup

Why did people want to delete their registration?

A person may register, planning to attend, and then later change their plans. Deleting their registration would be a way to communicate that they don’t plan on attending.

[tommyv]

@coreyhulse

We ended up with a 5-way tie for 3rd (all people at 7-3), so we needed to run a play-in

We ran a max match play with 31 players, about 10 arenas, and 10 matches. It took about 3 hours. The overall biggest problem I see with the format is the number of ties.

Points	Number of players
10	1
8	3
7	5
6	5
…	…

We had said we would advance just under half of the field to the finals and seeding mattered so we had quite a few tiebreakers to work through.

I don’t feel like it’s a good format for automatic strength of schedule tiebreakers since the pairings are random. Maybe automatic tiebreakers would be better if there was some sort of “similar strength opponent” preference in the pairing algorithm but I think it’d still be pretty far from the effect of a true Swiss pairing approach. So I guess just plan on having lots of ties with this format.

[hisokajp]

@tommyv

I don’t feel like it’s a good format for automatic strength of schedule tiebreakers since the pairings are random. Maybe automatic tiebreakers would be better if there was some sort of “similar strength opponent” preference in the pairing algorithm but I think it’d still be pretty far from the effect of a true Swiss pairing approach.

actually because paring is random having more values for your W that are against stronger opponent makes sense to me.

[tommyv]

@haugstrup For many of our players this was their first time using the new version of the site. Despite announcements asking them to go to the new site, many still went to the old version. They encountered error messages there.

Suggestion: maybe the old site could have a banner at the top of the tournament page for any max match play event that links to the new site page for that tournament?

Also, a note for tournament directors: with flip frenzy the waiting list is a queue so players can gauge how much time they’ll have before their next match. With Max Match Play, it felt more unpredictable given that it skips over players to avoid repeated pairings. So we had to spend more time tracking down players who had wandered off and didn’t know their turn was coming up again soon.

[haugstrup]

@bclement

For my location, Pinball Map and the Scorbit-powered list in MP are not aligned. The Sync Scorbit button doesn’t change anything. Is this an issue with Match Play, Pinball Map, or Scorbit?

I’m taking this one on the Match Play shoulders because I built things based on an incomplete understanding of how Scorbit and Pinball Map interacts.

From my side I was hoping to only build one integration. It’s easier for me to manage if I could only interact with Scorbit instead of having to interact with both Scorbit and Pinball Map.

But Scorbit is setup such that if a person “claims” a location in Scorbit then Scorbit will stop syncing data from Pinball Map. This is a reasonable approach because from the Scorbit side they’re assuming that if someone claims the location they’ll also keep the data up to data.

What happens some times though is that someone is playing around with Scorbit, claims a location as theirs but never returns. Now the data grows stale over time. I can’t say for sure, but I bet that’s what’s happened at your location.

Now, I wasn’t aware of this particular behavior when I planned the “From location” feature in MP, but I learned later how this is pretty annoying for TDs when it does happen.

So what I’ll be doing is what I was hoping to avoid: I’ll change the “From location” feature so you can get the list of machines from either Scorbit of Pinball Map. Then as a TD you pick whatever list of machines reflect reality.

That change will take time though. I think it’ll be nice in the end, but as always it’s a question of finding the time!

[haugstrup]

@tommyv

I don’t feel like it’s a good format for automatic strength of schedule tiebreakers since the pairings are random.

The pairings aren’t random. They’re highly deterministic. Players will be playing opponents they haven’t played before. The strength-of-schedule tiebreaker is a great tool for these kinds of pairings. It’ll perform just as well as if you’d played a similar number of balanced pairing rounds of regular match play.

[haugstrup]

@tommyv

For many of our players this was their first time using the new version of the site. Despite announcements asking them to go to the new site, many still went to the old version. They encountered error messages there.

Suggestion: maybe the old site could have a banner at the top of the tournament page for any max match play event that links to the new site page for that tournament?

It’s pretty dangerous for me to make changes to the old MP at this point That said, in the new year I will soon be starting to push all people to the new MP no matter what kind of tournament you’re playing.

Before long I will also start to take parts of the OLD MP site down. Sections that are resource intensive and have equivalent features are first on the chopping block (the Ratings pages will be first to go).

[Snailman]

@haugstrup revisiting this question. With all the SCS single elimination tourneys coming up… can the Best of X and/or match score (4-3, 4-2, 4-1, 4-0) be added for documenting results?
Even better if we could put the name of each game, and option for adding in a score for each game. But simply being able to record the 4-2, etc result would be great!

(tagging @spraynard on this, too, since we’re working through TX SCS setup)

[JoeTheDragon]

but that is player game choice so don’t default to random game picking

[haugstrup]

Let’s see how this goes over the next week. I can’t do the deluxe version where you can enter the arena and scores for each game because I’ve nowhere to put that data in the database currently (so basically can’t happen until I can fully transition away from the old Match Play). But I think I can get the win/loss numbers in there.

[hisokajp]

@haugstrup

do the deluxe version where you can enter the arena and scores for each game because I’ve nowhere to put that data in the database currently (so basically can’t happen until I can fully transition away from the old Match Play). But I think I can get the win/loss numbers in there.

nice i would rather stay with matchplay than challonge this again