I’m happy to hear your tournament went well!
I think so. Emojis have been possible for a while (since I moved databases last year) but I haven’t advertised the possibility. Only a handful of people have found out on their own 
2 Likes
Adding my initial recap of first Max Match Play format that we’ve run here in Austin…
Overall: great experience. Vast majority of players that gave me their feedback had positive things to say, and preferred it to our traditional Group Match Play format we’d been using (as many rounds as possible over 3 hours)
31 players. Max Match play format. Format worked really well. Didn’t get any more TGP than we had been getting from standard 4P round-based group match play qualifying. But the consensus was that it “felt” like you were playing more pinball and less waiting for the one long-playing 4P match to finish.
On all moderns. Even with them set up difficult, it took full 3 hours to get 12 H2H games in. No initial ball saves. Tight tilts at lowest denounce. Sensitive slings all around. Outlane post rubbers removed. MB ball savers cut in half.
Started with 13 pins, and lost Champ Pub during round 1. Then quickly lost CV. And lost IJ WMS very late in the event, so we ran with 11 for most of the evening. Initially, we would Create Games as soon as we got down to 2 pins available, though many times we had 3 pins available by the time we clicked it. Halfway through the event, we moved to waiting until we had 3 pins available before Creating Games. We had most players all within one game of each other in terms of games played.
When we got down to having some players that started having all 12 games played, and noted that there were a handful of players still playing their 11th game, then we delayed Creating Games until the last two players playing their 11th game had finished, so we had a pool of 6 players to assign the final 3 matches to.
We had ZERO repeat opponents! Everyone had a handful of “2” repeat games, and only one player that had a “3” repeat game. Well done, @haugstrup !!
Scorekeepers being able to Create Games… I selected “Yes” but none of the Scorekeepers had an option to Create Games from their phone. So they just went to my laptop to Create Games, and that worked fine. @haugstrup I’m not sure why my Scorekeepers that were playing couldn’t create games. Perhaps because we created the tourney prior to you making the change in MP? The option presented itself on the tourney organization/admin screen, and we selected it, and had the Scorekeepers set up. What do we need to differently to enable it?
2 Likes
Could be that your scorekeepers needed a reload of the tournament config. After you open a tournament the config isn’t updated unless you switch away from the tournament (like going to the dashboard and back again or you reload the browser).
Still deciding on the best strategy for refreshing the tournament config. I’ll get there eventually
Finding myself not a fan of the format. It doesn’t eliminate the waits, it backlogs them into the final rounds when you are waiting around for the people with less games played to finish their game to create new matches to avoid sticking people with no one to play. Also not a huge fan of having first place be determined by software tiebreakers. To be fair I haven’t played in one that uses MMP as a qualifying format with a separate finals, that at least would avoid that situation.
I think this is actually not a problem, because disabling ball save does not eliminate the added ball save time for hitting a skill shot, so shooting the left outlane SS should still result in a ball save.
if skill shot ball save is set to off then no
if secret skill shots off then no
a lot of TDs ALSO eliminate skill shot ball saves on games like godzilla.
maiden needs a note when secret skill shot is disabled though. cause if ball save and secret skill shot are disabled and the player doesn’t know they can screw themselves.
I appreciate the conversation on how to handle players leaving early. Right now my event description says if you leave early you will be removed, as things currently are set up to handle. If there was a “pause player” option or something that would take them out of future rounds but not delete prior results that would be ideal. I have run 5-6 of these and I like them as do my players, so certainly plan to keep them going.
1 Like
Last weekend we run a max matchplay 27 Player 26 Rounds Round Robin
All went smoothly, Just at the End we were shocked as for 3 players showed 27 rounds and rest 26 rounds.
But we recalculated amount of games and all had 26 rounds, so it was only a display bug, but did not matter.
https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/111928/standings
As in past on MM we had always to take care that in the end the difference between the lowest plaid rounds and highest played rounds is small to avoid that the same players have to play against each other again in the last rounds.
This weekend we will have another round-robin
-
If we use max matchplay for round-robin, we do not need to care when we create new games, right?
-
I remember there was a discussion, that in future could be possible to pause a player for example he wants to eat something. Is this still a plan in future?
-
I asked already if in future it could be possible that tournament director can decide if a player leaves the tournament, all games will be deleted or not. IFPA rules mark that if someone plays 50% of total games, he will be counted. We’ve already played 34 rounds, and one player left the tournament because he saw that they wouldn’t make it to the finals. So please let decide tournament director if player will be deleted or not. If not, of course, the rest of the players need the same amount of games in the end.
but then you have other issues like
the missing player spot should not give lot’s of free wins to other players maybe 1-2 may have to have to happen but say 50-10% of the rounds have an free win to an player?
what if you have an add an dummy player to just play the gone player does that dummy player have to be ifpa logged and pay the $1 fee?
also the delete choice is bad as that removes both win’s an losses from other players and that may have IFPA issues.
Now you may say that with an delete it’s like that player did not play at all and that may an work around for the 50% in rule.
still need to even out number of games played for all players.
1 Like
Correct, if you have the number of games set for a true round robin (or a double round robin) then you can hit the “create matches” button as often as you’d like without risking repeat opponents.
I haven’t thought about pausing a player. I’ve made a note to consider it in the future. Currently leaning towards “no” because it can really wreck a tournament if used wrong.
No, one of primary rule in Max Matchplay is, that every player play same amount of rounds by ending the tournament.
So if one player left the tournament, other players should still have in the end the same amount of games plaid.
If there are more total rounds than “player-1” anyway should not be a problem, if there are fewer players than rounds also it is no problem as some player will have same opponent 2 times anyway.
If the tournament is a round-robin, in this case the tournament director should delete all result for player who left the tournament.
We played an MM tournament yesterday.
Although it was IFPA certified, it was rather a tournament with many beginners, since only Friday evening from 7 pm. 35 players, 12 rounds before the finals.
2 players (1 couple) had to give up shortly before the end because of an emergency call. Some had played against them but because of that, suddenly some players played 1–2 games less than others, so that the differences in already played rounds became bigger, the playing time of the whole tournament had increased because of that and at the end even double pairings were created. (Normally this never happens in my MM-tournaments if no player quits)
In our pinball club, we play our league 1 time a month. As it is more for fun, here it also happens that players do not stay until the end. We used MM. But for this reason since a while we play like before “Head to Head matchplay”.
I had asked before. Is it planned for the future that the tournament director decides whether all games of eliminated players are deleted or not? Exception of course Round Robin. In the end, MM is only about the fact that everyone has played the same number of games.
What happens if one player ends up with less games than everyone else? For example, everyone has 10 games and one player has 8 games and the end?
I believe what happened is near the end 3 players had 9 games and 1 player had 7 games. The TD created a game with 2 of the 9-game players paired together. Then the 7-game player was paired with the remaining 9-game player. So, in the end that player only had 8 games and no one to pair with unless they could play themself!
So, how does this affect the IFPA submission and TGP? Counts as 8 TGP since one player only had 8 games? I kind of screwed the one player who only got 8 games in the standings.
1 Like
How did it work out with the IFPA submission? In my opinion this should be treated as 10 meaningful games played since that is what the vast majority of players completed.
In my mind it’s similar to what would happen if you were using a group match play format and one of the players needed to leave a 10-round tournament two rounds early. They would be included in the results with the points they earned in the 8 rounds they played. They’re not dropped from the results because they played in at least 50% of the qualifying requirements.
If that player is ok with missing out on the opportunity to play those two matches, then I think it’s fine to let the results stand as they were. If they want to play those two games I’d have them play matches vs the two players closest to them in the standings. The opponents have an incentive to try to win to preserve their spot in the standings, even though they could not earn any additional points. If the person who was two matches short gets more wins in these extra games then use Adjust Points to increase their final standings points. It’s not a great solution but it’s something.
For the situation where someone leaves near the end, I let their results stand, and the couple matches that they got assigned after they left, they forfeited that match. In my thinking, it was better to negatively impact the 1 or 2 matches where their future opponent was granted an instant win, than the negative effect of removing from existence the 10-11 matches already played.
Also better for tournament time/schedule.
Also, knowing that this will happen, it encourages people to stick around, knowing that they can’t bail and not have their results counted.
No one is really answering my question about what the TGP should be. If one player ends up with less games (8) than everyone else, and that player did not leave, they just ran out of opponents because everyone else already played 10 games.
IFPA says for Max Matchplay: The number of matches played by all players will be the number of meaningful games counted towards TGP.
In this case should it be TGP of 10 or 8?
If you dialed everyone else back, and only counted all players’ first 8 games, then it should be 8 MGP - and all but one pissed off player.
If you decided “that’s pinball” for the player who only played 8 games, and they received 0’s for their last two unplayed games, then 10 MGP – and one pissed off player.