Hi Everyone! After a much needed post-PAPA break from all things pinball, I’m reading through this thread. Thanks for all the feedback! The comments have been constructive and specific which is exactly what we are looking for in feedback. Instead of responding to individual posts, I’m going to summarize the requests/questions that were asked and answer them in one post. If I don’t cover something that was posted about, please remind me and I’ll address it.
Viewing results on the Desktop : Testing the website on a desktop was limited to macbooks. And because of the fact that the macbook supports gestures (like swiping to scroll up and down), we never noticed the problem with scrolling with a normal mouse. This is something that is high up on the “to be fixed” list.
Selecting text/exporting results : The javascript framework that is being used defaults to not letting text be selected. Setting it to allow text to be selected is possible, and is also high up on the “to be fixed” list. As for exporting results directly to text files, it is possible right now. A post will be made in the next few days explaining how to do it.
System does not show players previous scores or full history with timestamps : For the foreseeable future, this will not be implemented. It is a computationally expensive operation and a bandwidth expensive operation. If we have 250+ players (half the number of players playing at PAPA 20) trying to get thousands of rows out of the database at once, it significantly slows the system down. But that doesn’t mean the information can’t be provided in another form. Over the course of last weekend I asked a number of players what they would do with their own full history - the answer boiled down to “see how much my play has changed (or remained consistent) on a given machine”. We can provide that information (and more) in the form of summary statistics. For example, we could provide a “how much has your score improved or suffered on a given machine” statistic. This feature is high up on the todo list, and when we goto design it we will be collecting feedback from players on what they would want to see.
Finals Results : There were a number of bugs in the code that handled the recording and reporting of finals results. The end result was we had to use paper and pencil for recording scores, and it took a while for results to get entered into the system. Some of the finals results (Classics III for example) are still in a bad state, but should be fixed by the end of the week. Unfortunately, all this meant results were not available for the broadcast. The good news is that the finals code is the first thing we are going to work on fixing.
Highlighting yourself/seeing what machine you are playing or queued on : Highlighting yourself (when you are logged into the app) is already on the list of features to add. If you are logged into the app, you can also currently see which machine you are playing on or are queued on ( on the home page, the “player info” page gives this information ). We can make the player name/icon at the top of the player page a link to that.
The big download size if you are accessing the site from a web browser : Yeah - unfortunately, we didn’t get around to minimizing/zipping up things before PAPA 20. It’s on the list of things that need to be improved.
Make push notifications more specific (i.e. instead of “the queue has changed”, it should say “you are now Xth place in the queue”) : This is on the list of things to change
The shared machine bank (i.e. D division/Womens/Seniors/Juniors/Split) : As some people noticed, the shared bank proved to be troublesome for the software. We will be looking at how feasible it is to use queuing on that bank for next year, and any improvements we can make so that scorekeepers have an easier time with that bank.
Results cut off at 120 players : As some folks noticed, there were more than 120 players in Classics. The software cutoff displaying division results at 120 players. This was due to performance problems on older phones once you got past displaying 100 players at once. The correct solution (which will be implemented) is to lazy load the results, so that all results are displayed, but they are not all loaded and rendered at once.
If you didn’t see a response in this post to your question/request, post it again and we will respond.