drneau.com

[drneau]

Just wanted to let everyone know I used v3 for my league championship on May 17th, 2008.

I had done little prep before that day due to the personal issues that were going on, so this was actually a good experience to try v3 out.

Our championship consisted of a heads-up tournament and a championship freezeout.

For the most part, it worked great. Here's a summary:

I had to create 6 custom consoles quick. v3 was awesome for this. The ability to create a console by adding multiple components at once, copying a component multiple times, moving components around (on top of each other) and editing multiple attributes on multiple components at once was a very welcome change.

I discovered some performance problems with the way I was managing images that I've now fixed. Essentially, I was doing image scaling a very slow way...I actually had one image that took 3 seconds to scale. I'm now using a new image scaling technique that is much much faster and just as good.

A few days before the tournament, I created a new console component called an "Announcement Marquee" that lets you associate announcement collections with your console theme and then scrolls the announcements from said associated collections across the component horizontally. So, I used it throughout the night to:
- Congratulate the season winners
- Alert people that a survey will be coming in email...watch for it
- Solicit interest in summer cash games
It worked great.

Before this night, I had decided against a relation between a tournament and a console theme, so I'd completely broken the link between the two. I thought it was dumb to have to modify your tournament to change the console theme.
In prep for the night, I started to get confused because I was prepping for two different tournaments that would use two different themes..and I started editing the wrong theme.
The result: A tournament now has a "preferred theme". How it works: When you open a tournament, if it specifies a "preferred theme" then that theme is automatically activated. If it doesn't specify a "preferred theme", then the current theme stays active. You can change the current theme at any time without changing the preferred theme for the active tournament. This is a great solution.

I used the new "Traditional-Simple" tournament type. This type does not track players like you are used to in v2 (that will be the "Traditional-Standard" type.) To create the tournament, I used the New Tournament Wizard and that was awesome. Basically, I had to:
- Type in the name of the tournament and the amount I was adding to the prize pool (the league prize pool)
- Create a single buy-in option ($0 for T25,000...this was a championship freeroll)
- Select my chip case from a pre-created component and create a chip distribution.
- Create the betting schedule (used the new betting schedule for that...and I must say it was spot-on timing-wise)
- Create a new payout schedule (championship paid 2 spots exactly with a 67/33 split)
- Enter my expenses (championship trophy + bracelet + consolation tournament prize)
That whole process took 3 minutes...not to bad for a one-off tournament where I could only reuse one component (the chip case).
While doing that, I thought of a few more ways to streamline the creation that I've since implemented...like automatically populating the "tournament display name" when you set the "tournament name", if the display name has no text.

Since the tournament, I've also made two other major decisions that I've implemented...

Major decision #1: A simple tournament can still have a ranking method
I've created a "previewer" for a ranking method that lets you enter parameters and try your ranking method out. I've added this capability to a simple tournament so that it automatically picks up the tournament parameters (number of players, etc) but still lets you plug in the player-specific parameters (like player finish, etc).

Major decision #2: A simple tournament can still belong to a league
Simply a way to let you group related tournaments together. To do this, I've created two types of leagues:
- Simple league: Can contain simple tournaments. It has no player database and no way of calculating overall league leaders.
- Standard league: Can contain standard tournaments. It has a player database (and all tournaments in a league must use that league's player database) and it can calculate overall league leaders. For ranking, each tournament in a league can use its own ranking method. The league is in charge of totalling up the points to calculate league leaders, so therefore the league is in charge of things like: number of tournaments needed to qualify, which tournaments should be counted, which players should be ignored for league standings, etc.
_________________
--
Dr. Neau (not a real doctor)
http://drneau.com
http://home.comcast.net/~jneau

[MissileMan]

That all sounds great... I hope to be using it soon!!

[popposoft]

please, give me a beta

[MissileMan]

[drneau]

[MissileMan]