I’ve played and TD’ed in the two we ran, and it’s hectic to say the least, especially if you have only one person in the queue. To be fair, I played pretty poorly because of the hectic-ness, but people gave positive feedback on the format and we’re willing to try it again soon with improvements to make it better for both the TDs and the Players.
When we did our post-event recap after our second event, here are some of our thoughts:
- We made a change that instead of winner-leaves-except-in-specific-cases, we said you’re going to always play two games on a machine. P1 becomes P2, and P2 leaves the game. New person who comes onto the game is P1. It worked a LOT smoother as people always knew they were playing two games on each machine.
- Designate at least 3 TDs. We ran this with the same group that we typically do League with, so there were multiple people on hand to deal with game issues even thought half the field was usually playing at once.
- I am not sure how you plan to enter scores, but I would designate either the TDs or (maybe a few others) as scorekeepers. We had people write results on paper (so we’d have a paper trail), and then I would add those scores into the Google Sheet that we were using for calculating standings. When you’re not playing, the Scorekeepers should be entering the results.
- One item that we’ll do for next time is opening up the Google Sheet to be viewable by everyone during the course of the event, and there are some improvements that I’d like to make to make it as simple as possible for people to view outcomes of individual matches that they can be engaged and fact-checking their own individual matches during the event so that they can raise any objections before the event is closed out.
- Throw some kind of timer up on a shared screen so that people know EXACTLY how much time is left, and tell people that they can’t start any new games when the timer goes off, but they can finish up existing games.
- Build in 10 minutes post-event close to finalize any final scores and to double-check results.
I have a mostly-baked Google Sheet that I’m happy to share with everyone. There’s no documentation to it, but feel free to copy it/use it for your own events, and I as I continue to iterate I’ll publish new versions.
I also submitted a MatchPlay Request on UserVoice to see if there was more general support for this idea to be included on the MatchPlay Platform: https://matchplay.uservoice.com/forums/595996-general/suggestions/32526337-flip-frenzy-or-pinballpinballpinball-score-trackin