Match Play Events Open Thread

Random is just that… random. So you will see some players be assigned the #1 spot more often than others. It’s rare that random is the best choice for any of the settings because random doesn’t feel random to humans.

To get a more balanced distribution pick the… “balanced” option. It’ll make sure that players play every position evenly (or as good as it gets, nothing is perfect).

“Rotating” is a pretty specialized option. It only works when you have more than one game per round. It’s best if you have four-player groups and four games per round. In that case every player plays every position once in each round.

You’ve opened a can of worms, haven’t you! I hope you are making some money out of this. At the very least, the pinball community worldwide is thoroughly enjoying the product of your efforts.

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the man should put some ads on it, I think subscription only really pays hosting.

I really don’t like ads. Maybe something very specific made for sponsors at certain events at some point in the future, but never general ads.

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Looking forward to using this for my tournament this weekend.

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Playing around with charts a bit more. You can now get a bar chart showing player counts for a series. Here’s what the current SFPD season looks like: https://matchplay.events/live/series/119/stats

(it’s a bit of a hack, but you put guests into the guest column by prefixing their name with “Guest” because that’s how we keep track of guests at SFPD)

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There are some issues with player order in Match Play.

The “random” order option suggests that it will allocate player order, not choice of order. For other options, the descriptions in the software suggest that choice of order will be assigned.

However, the software always assigns P1-P4 to players when using 4-player formats, and always says that one player “Has play order choice” in head-to-head formats.

I’ve played in a major tournament where the top qualifiers were forced to play as P1 in every game of group elimination finals, due to TDs blindly following Match Play.

Also, the “balanced” option, when used in the group match play format with multiple games per round, gives the same player order for every game in a round. Is this a bug?

Ugh, this is absolutely terrible. Some points:

  • When playing multiple games per round, the player order will be the same for all games (unless the “rotating” option is used). It’s not a bug, the TD should use his/her powers to manually adjust the player order for games. I did it this way because juggling player order more or less randomly within the same round will 100% make sure that players will play out of turn often.
  • The default player order setting for “group brackets” is to list players by initial seeding. So the top seed will always be listed as player 1! It’s done this way to make it easy to locate the top seed in case the tournament calls for player order to be chosen according to seeding.

This highlights that I have a lot of work to do writing more documentation to better explain how these things work. I’m really sorry you’ve had to play in a tournament like that :frowning:

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Thanks. It seems the problem is that Match Play uses the same notation to designate both order of play (when assigned) and choice of order.

Manually adjusting the player order is far more trouble than it’s worth. Using the “random” option, Match Play does actually give a different player order for each game in a round (e.g. https://matchplay.events/live/mm-2016/matches). It used to behave like this with the “balanced” option, too (see Melbourne Matchplay Championship • Matches • Match Play Live). My preference would be for the old behaviour.

Huge thanks for adding the ability to print scoresheets from Match Play! This will save many TDs much time and effort. The feature does have one little aesthetic glitch: a weird extra header appears on all but the first scoresheet printed for a round.

What if, in these situations, the player’s rank was listed instead? The listing could say something like “#1 Beavis vs #4 Butthead” and just skip over or cut the “P1” reference?

In any case – as always, thanks for working so hard on improving what is already an amazing thing.

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Yeah, MP doesn’t have a notion of “suggested play order”. It only has a “play order”. I kept it vague on purpose because no two TD seem to do the same thing, but that might be a mistake. As @bkerins mentions below it could be a solution to break up that difference. It would mean adding more configuration options and I hate adding more settings. There are already so many settings :frowning:

Hmm, did that balanced tournament actually turn out balanced or did I just have a bug? Doing it this way requires a re-calculation of previous player positions after each game has been created and I’m fairly certain I never did that. I’ve added it to my mental list of things to reconsider. Mostly because these will be better:

@LCM can you email me screenshot/photos of the printed scoresheets glitch at play@matchplay.events ? I just want to make sure I understand what you’re seeing.

Could you draw a line between a player’s N games that do count for a best N games qualifying format vs. the lower-ranked ones that aren’t contributing to their standing?

Mayyybeeeee? Can you send me a screenshot of the page you want the line drawn on?

60-80 players in a single-location weekly league = awesome. So jealous.

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@haugstrup: For group play 3-strikes knockout, how does the software group players if there are more players with the same # of strikes than spots available in the next round’s group?
For example: 8 players with one strike each, needing to be spread across 4 groups.
Does MP simply assign groups amongst those 8 players randomly? Or does it use initial qualifying seeding of those players used at the beginning of the 3-strikes event?

Thanks in advance.

@Snailman It follows whatever pairing option you have selected for your tournament. Random, swiss and balanced would create player pairings in different ways.

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I used this software for my Flippin the Fox 3 strike tournament in 4 player group format and it worked wonderfully.
The software was extremely easy to use. I loved that I could print out scoresheets as well.
I got a lot of compliments with the live standings.
Only comments I received was that a person was always selected as 2nd place in the order for every game. I had the order of play set to random.
Thanks!

Happy to hear you and your players enjoyed the software!

If you choose “random” you will see outliers like this where one or two players are disproportionally assigned a specific player position. That’s the nature of “random”. Leave the setting at “balanced” for a more balanced approach (starting positions are balanced out so all players play all positions roughly equal amounts). This is almost always a better choice. When players and TDs say they want “random” they usually want “balanced”. :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the response. Noted and will use balanced in the future. Thank you for the amazing software.

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Thanks, Andreas, as always. Is it possible to have a “Swiss-Balanced” pairing option for Group Play X-Strikes Knockout? Where MP first tries to group players by similar # of strikes, but when there is a tie in # of strikes, that it then remembers which players have been faced, and tries to put players in groups where they’ve face the fewest # of players that they’ve previously played.

My idea: I would prefer that when you have large # of players tied for same # of strikes, that there is some attempt by the software to not have the same players face each other again, if possible.

Or is my idea too difficult because… computers are hard? :frowning:

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