Provide more options to assigning arenas
I've noticed on TILT several people have requested more options for assigning arenas, mainly from a point of view to control crowds and spacing.
Example #1 from Ron - I am running a group matchplay tournament with 40 players and 30 arenas/games for 8 rounds. 2 of the games are upstairs, the other 28 are in the basement. For crowd dispersement purposes, I want the 2 upstairs games to be used every round. Is this doable in the Match Play software?
Example #2 from Chad - I run several tournaments a year at a private home that has games on 2 different levels. My events have a minimum of 48 people and its too crowded to have all 48 downstairs at the same time. 65% of the games are downstairs(11), and the other 35% are upstairs (6). Each round requires 12 machines. If I let Matchplay randomly pick from ALL arenas, often times we have 40-44 people downstairs, which is too many people in one room. At one point I created groups by putting every other game in group B, the only problem with this is that it only allows 12 people to play on 3 of the games upstairs.
My question for you is are you able to come up with a way where the software can always ensure the games upstairs are picked every round, and then the rest of the games selected from arenas downstairs? Currently I have to start a new round, uncheck "publish", draw games from Group B which has all 6 games in it, and then draw the remaining games from Group A. While I can generally accomplish what I need to do, it is cumbersome and slow to go to every match that doesn't have an arena assigned to it and then have the software pick from group "A".
Example #3 from Corey - We have an upcoming event where we are going to have 40 players and 17 machines.
I’ve split the machines into three categories
A: Fastest Playing (7 Machines)
B: Mid (5 Machines)
C: Longest Playing (7 Machines)
The goal is to either have a “Fast” or a “Slow” round.
What would be the better thing to do in MatchPlay?
Draw a Round with “A” or “C” Machines, and fill in the gap manually for each group with “B” Machines.
Create duplicates of the “B” Machines and assign them to both “A” and “C” so that every match is assigned a machine.
Manually change the “B” Machines each round to either “A” or “C” depending on what round we’re drawing next.
What I’m unsure of is if there are not enough machines in the pool to assign every group a machine, how does it choose which groups don’t get a machine, and when you manually draw a machine does it take previous matches into account?
Right now I’m leaning towards the third option. A little bit of overhead per round, but I think the optimal regarding machine assignments.
Chad Hastings
shared this idea
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RedViper
commented
Very important now as we get more players. I our case a line up would have it's own value and only so many matches could get assigned to that line up and then equally the same amount of matches in each line up.
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Anonymous
commented
This would be a game changer in terms of setting up tournaments for me, and plenty of others have suggested it as well. The way i'm looking at it is similar to example 3 - although i like to look at it as having 1 game from each era per 3 game round. So each round has an EM or SS machine, a 90s DMD and Modern machine - which pretty well lines up with Fast, medium and long playing games. So what i would absolutely love is to categorise my machines into 3 groups (lets just call them A,B,C), then matchplay randomly draws one from each category for each round. I think you would need the option for 2 or 3 categories, and this would cater for people who have upstairs/downstairs. Then also the option to force matchplay to select either: one game from each category per round, full round (whether 2 or 3 games) from 1 category only, custom selection (maybe 2 from 1 category and 1 from either of the remaining category(s)).
This would save so much time setting up banks, and also allow participants to likely play a wider variety of games. So mathplay would prioritise player grouping first, then game allocation from each category, maybe prioritse the higher ranked groups first in terms of selecting the least played game(s) of the group. Happy to discuss further or trial