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- The Manager
- The manager had run a variety of tournaments, both small scale and medium scale tournaments (~10 participants and ~35 participants respectively). He is most experienced in running small tournaments, being the go-to guy with his friends for setting up brackets for tournaments that take only a few hours to complete. He has run a handful of medium sized tournaments for larger groups, but is by no means an expert. In the medium sized tournament, the hardest aspect of managing and running the tournament was figuring out the tournament structure and generating the matches. With that many teams, there were many different possible tournament styles: single elimination, double elimination, round-robin, etc. Because of the unusual conditions of the tournament, three-player matches (1v1v1) instead of two-player matches (1v1), he decided that the simplest, yet still fair, tournament structure was a round-robin tournament with one player having a bye to the second round. At each stage of the tournament he had to manually generate the next set of round robin matches. The small scale tournament was a simpler, single-elimination bracket. This smaller tournament was much more well defined and as a result much easier to maintain. Using a simple whiteboard, players would just write down the winner of each match after it was played.
- Lessons Learned:
- Generation of a bracket is often difficult without prior knowledge
- Tedious to have to generate all next set of rounds for large numbers of participants (especially in round robin tournaments)
- Updating winners/scores easy under certain conditions (small scale tournament with few participants and on a small time scale)
- Running a longer tournament single-handed takes a lot of time
- Different set of difficulties in running small and large tournaments.
- The Player PlayerThe player is always up for a tournament among friends. Whether it is ping-pong or pool, the player is ready to show off his skills and hopes to end up the winner. He travels in different circles, spending his free time between his co-workers, college friends, and dance buddies, which sometimes results in participating in multiple tournaments at once. He needs to keep track of his scores, report them to his friend in charge, and figure out who his next opponent.
- Lessons Learned
- Needs a way to keep track of different tournaments
- Wants to be able to easily view his record
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- Lessons Learned
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- Lessons Learned
- Manager/Player
- The Manager/Player (so called because she typically both manages tournaments, as well as playing in them. These are typically smaller, more impromptu tournaments between friends. Usually she turns to Google Docs to keep track of the tournament, and although it works sufficiently well, it require more setup and maintenance than she'd like. For instance, she is now the point person for creating the Google Doc, inviting others to view the tournament, and prodding those falling behind in their scheduled games to get their games finished. Doing this again and again can get tiring, especially since this Manager/Player wants to play her games in a timely manner as well.
- Lessons Learned:
- The Manager/Player would really love to have a largely automated solution that would require little extra effort on her part as the creator of the tournament
- She's not looking for any amazingly advanced features, but rather a simple yet effective setup that doesn't require everyone to make new accounts and receive invites, and allows everyone to log in quickly.
- Inviting people to games should be as simple as emailing or sharing a link or code to anyone you'd like to be in the tournament (ie. you don't need to know their Gmail addresses or be friends with them on Facebook)
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