I play in and co-host a league where each session is a 16-player round robin. Since it’s a league we don’t worry about ties in any single session, but I do expect that you’ll have a large number of ties. If you plan on cutting to a finals I’d definitely recommend having a plan for how you’ll break ties (even among 5+ players). We did run a max match play tournament with a finals once and it lead to a 6-way tie. Fortunately we had a Baywatch available. Here’s another idea for a situation where you expect a lot of tied players: you could tell players ahead of time to record their first score on a particular machine and use those scores as the tiebreaker; anyone who didn’t get assigned that game would play it at the end of qualifying if needed. Of course just running a 3-player then 2-player pair of tiebreaker games also works.
Using Max Match Play definitely runs faster than using a traditional round robin where everyone waits for the round to finish before starting their next game (and it has the potential to use fewer machines), but it will run slower than a flip frenzy.
The pairings definitely go slower towards the end. You can manage this a bit by spreading that waiting time throughout the evening by not letting any player get too far behind the rest of the group. You don’t need to do this with a round robin but I think it still makes for a more pleasant player experience.
We have a 24-player max match play round robin planned for 5/13. I’ll let you know how it goes! We plan to have 12 machines and use all 12. What’s the reasoning behind limiting arenas to max of 10 in use at once?
We do a Women’s Max Match Play 14 games in 2 hours, so it is plausible depending on how the machines are setup and the skill level of the players. I don’t think I would get it done in 2 hours with regular league players be more like 2.5 hours I would think with our setups. We at least have 2 sec ball save on Moderns but they are setup pretty difficult.
Centaur, Zaccaria Locomotion, Zaccaria Space Shuttle, Genesis, Baywatch, Road Show, Fish Tales, Attack from Mars, World cup soccer, Junk Yard, Creech and Diner.
I’ve been experimenting with settings to try and make them not too easy, but I don’t like them to be unfairly hard. Most of our players are intermediate but get a handful of top 20 UK players. Annoyingly the ROM in my Junk yard seems buggy and no matter what I change ball saves remain on. Even when set to off! But on AFM the exact settings have different results. JY does have the soren ROM so maybe it’s got a bug, I’ll have to ask him.
I’ve done a few test Matchplay events when a friend came over and after 24 games, the avg was 6:30, with most games lasting between 3 to 8mins. With surprisingly Diner lasting over 10mins every time… I would not have predicted that. I guess I’ll remove post rubbers.
If it takes longer, it takes longer. It’s our first time trying this format and it’ll be a learning experience. As long as the players know I’m sure it’ll be okay.
We have a playoffs for the top 8. Usually our events start around 1030 and finals are fine by 1800 with a break for lunch at 1330-1415ish
Ours is on 29th of April so I’ll be along with the results before your event.
Reasoning for 10 active games is because I like to have a bit of space and two games available so it’s unlikely you’ll get out back on the same game straight away. I will keep an eye on it during the first session and alter it if needed.
I suppose similar to the wpc-s games where you turn ball save off there’s no insert lamp flashing but you get the ball back if it drains quick?
I’ll set it to off and give it another test. I was hoping setting it to 4 seconds would do something but it didn’t seem to when compared to another Wpc95 game (afm)
number of ball saves is different from time and all games have some level of valid playfield.
Some games like Indianapolis 500 where ball save off does not trun it off but seems to make the time an little less and Scared Stiff does not do any thing.
as well games like Bram Stoker’s Dracula Do not trun off ball save or make it very small (buggy and multi ball save time is the same setting as main ball save).
Those who’ve run Max Match Play… what are the best practices for timely and effectively notifying Waiting Room players to check whether they’ve been assigned to a new match each time you Create Games? Specifically in loud environments with people in nearby different areas – we have the pins all in a line at a family entertainment center, and some people hang there while they watch a current match or chat with players who are in those matches, some that hang out in an adjacent “party room” that the FEC lets us use, and others that will be at the nearby bar and tables that are within sight of the games. And I’m assuming some others will go outside during some of their Waiting Room stints to have a smoke.
a PA system in the venue was super useful, even then, people wander off, go out for a smoke, it is hard to run with casuals in a mixed bar/arcade location and stay efficient for sure-
I’ve encouraged my players to signup for a MatchPlay account and I turn on (and pay for myself) text notifications. I haven’t specifically used this in Max Match Play, but have had decent success in regular matchplay tournaments. However, I will also admit that over half my player base still doesn’t seem motivated to sign up for a Matchplay account so YMMV.
Edit: I have been using old matchplay quite a bit and just realized I can’t find the checkbox to enable text notifications on the Next.Matchplay version. Maybe I’m missing it… @haugstrup ??
The above is one of the drawbacks of Max Matchplay. I’m finally running one tomorrow, set as a round robin.
Our issue is we have a small living room with the TV showing the big screen and no other screens. This works for flip frenzies as people know where they are in the queue. But our main space is outside.
With max Matchplay we’re going to put a TV outside to display the big screen also and hopefully people will get used to checking to see if they are in a match.
It’s that or they constantly refresh Matchplay on their phones.
We’re going to be creating new games every minute or less, so shouting or announcing wouldn’t really work, especially considering this is a house with the pins in different rooms.
I predict people getting to their matches will be the main cause of delays in this format. Fingers crossed people get used to it and help out by finding their opponent if they haven’t appeared!
This might be a good time to point out there’s discord notifications available in MP Next now as a beta. I tested it out earlier this week and it worked out, I think I’ll try it out at the next MMP event I attend/run.
My solution has been to announce the machines and player names for each game. But obviously that doesn’t scale up, or work in a loud environment, or work if players are going to wander away from the playing area. This is definitely a disadvantage from Flip Frenzy where the time in the queue was a little more consistent and predictable.
Having the matches on a TV at the tournament director table worked really well for the first Max Matchplay I ran. Will see how it goes in the next month when I run another. I ran it as a round robin and players seemed to understand it well and mostly had a few minutes between every other round or so, enough to lend time for any sort of break
I only added it last night. Half the TDs of the world thinks their tournaments will be ruined if scorekeepers can create matches, the other half thinks their tournaments can’t be run unless scorekeepers can creates matches. So now there’s a setting!
Put this in the other Matchplay thread by accident but it was supposed to be here…
Regarding our max Matchplay yesterday…
It was a huge success! Thanks so much for the new format and letting some of us test it since last year. I was so excited but also anxious to run our real one.
25 players, so 300 games played total over 4.5hrs.
Originally we intended to have 10 active games (12 arenas in total) but went with using 9 and thought we could adjust after lunch if things were running too slowly but 9 was perfect. There was always 6 in waiting area and a few who had just finished their matches.
The feedback so far has been that it was more social than the flip frenzies which I thought would be the opposite!
We had 3 people who could create games and without them I think it would have slowed down. As soon as active games dropped below 9 they hit create games and sometimes it might drop to 8 or less but it was rare. As it was set as a round robin this didn’t create any issues at all.
The only tiny tiny tiny issue is the amount of ties you’re likely to get. We had two tiebreakers (top. 8 qualified for playoffs, semi, quarter and finals). But I can’t see how you can minimise ties with this format.
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