i skimmed through Paul's DC winning effort from yesterday earlier and my conclusion was confusion.

5 in TIMED right now.

I think this is the 1st time I've broken the hallowed 1330 DC rating mark.

I just added the newest batch of changes. I may need to bring the site down again if anything doesn't run smoothly, but at the moment it looks ok

Here's a partial list of what's new:
- tournaments! very basic, very limited, more detail below
- resumeable (<- not a word) challenges. If your browser crashes halfway through the DC, no more needing to post in chat in hopes that I'll reset it. Just pick up where you left off.
- daily challenge display shows everyone's board at once (liked timed mode between rounds)
- counter of players in timed mode should work again
- a few small cosmetic changes

Mostly it's for the tourneys though. Someone come battle me! Who wants to be the first tournament champion? HUHU, let's go!

Offline TC tournaments are up for testing!

I decided to do a very stripped down version first, but also laid the groundwork for much more customization. Here are the restrictions for now (they should give a taste of what other possibilities exist):

Options:
- Tournament name
- 2-32 players (powers of 2 only).

Unchangeable:
- Single elimination.
- No byes.
- Matchups must be played offline rather than in timed mode
- Tournament only starts when it's full.
- No time limit on rounds
- 5 games per matchup.
- Both players must play all 5 games for the matchup to be complete and the tournament to progress, even if the winner is determined earlier.
- Only a single phase per tournament, so no option to do round robin followed by single elimination or make the final few rounds be more games per matchup
- Tied matchups are tiebroken first by total points for all 5 games, then by higher seed
- Players are seeded by their daily rating
- All games are 1 vs 1
- All games are played in normal mode


Other than that, do whatever you want! :-)

My next step is to come up with an ordered list of what restrictions to relax. I'm thinking these first (relatively soon):
- Adjustable games per round
- 48 hour time limit per round
- Byes possible
- Adjustable start date, tournament starts then even if not full

Followed by these (maybe soon, maybe not):
- Ability to play a tournament game in timed mode if both players are present and click a check box.
- Better seeding system
- Matchup ends when one player has won a majority of the games
- Adjustable time limit per round
- tournament creator can delete it if it's not complete

The rest (who knows when):
- graphical bracket
- more formats: double elimination, round-robin, swiss, last man standing*
- more than 2 players per matchup
- advanced mode shenanigans
- more tiebreak options
- "official" tournaments that give badges

Anything else that should be in the first couple batches?

*last man standing: Everyone plays the same game, lowest scorer is eliminated from the tournament. Repeat til only one person remains.

OMFG!!

Tournaments looks freaking awesome! This is the nuts ZAC. And the DC board display is very cool too. Less click!

I'm still not appearing in timed.

Well this all looks awesome. TC has come a long way from when I started 2 years ago! I'll have to wait to try out Tournaments but that will be awesome.

Btw I don't know if this is just in IE8, but while the winners tab looks great, I can't click on any previous challenges or replay old challenge games.

Which moves confuse you? I'd be happy to explain. You'll have to post screenshots though as I can't currently replay old challenge games. PM me if you feel more comfortable with that.

Same, with firefox.

And i don't know if i will explain this well enough, but twice, since the update, i had a score displayed on recent scores who disapeared when i refresh the page or played another game. My game was MIA.

What would be a cool (but very minor) adaptation would be if all people playing in the same round of a tournament got the same game. For example if all four players in a semi-final played the same 5 games.

Also, with a HU tournament, if you could set it up and play the games before the other player registers.

FU yesterday's DC.

Thanks for the updates Zac.

+1

Would it be possible to add links to DC game scores to their game IDs? Like it was before? Currently there is no way to know the game IDs. I don't know if this is easy to do or even possible, but maybe even add the replayer to the page where all the games are shown? That way you could easily replay more than one game side-by-side looking at how racks are played.

Could the finishing positions of players be added to the DC result page?

+1 to both of these.

Lol ul.


Replaying games side-by-side would be awesome.

I decided to do it the way I did to discourage cheating in bigger tournaments. I could be talked out of it, but I need to see a pretty good argument.

I'll add this to my todo list, but it'll have to wait in line. At first glance it'll require quite a bit of work for not a huge benefit.

This one is at the top of my list to fix. I was going to include it in the update, just ran out of time before going to sleep.

Cool idea. I'll have to see how much work this would take, but it might be something I could drop in fairly easily.

I'll keep an eye out for this. Let me know if it keeps happening.

Yea, for real tournaments it should be like this. But those small sngs are only for fun, there isn't rating, wins, icons etc. involved, so it could be fun to see how you would've done if you had played in the other semi compared to your own.

That said, if you have to choose only one way to do it, the current one is better, since preventing cheating seems more important.

Scores should be visible after all players have played the board. That way there can only be cheating in a tournament if two players collude

Not something I worry about a lot. It can already be done at DC. As a matter of fact that guy Paul seems to win an awful lot

Dunno if this was lost in the recent flurry of posts, but the offer still stands.

i had missed it. I'll take a look and get back to you, thanks. I'm not sure i can replay DC games atm, looking at the page right now.

i recall thinking that your early willingness to put two 1s in the same square was odd, although that was a bit of a lightbulb moment i think, for me, and then there were some other things, but i forget what.

I added links to all daily challenge boards, so you should be able to go through replays now.

Thanks, however atm for me (vista, chrome), when i click on a bygone DC, i still get yesterday's DC results.

For those who didn't saw, tourneys are awesome!



More people should play them, imho.

So it looks like Derwi played a completely different game to everyone else in the DC on the 10th...

Interesting bug, I don't think that game was actually my challenge game. It looks like it used one of my normal games as a challenge result somehow.

When I try to play the final of "4 by 5 battle (4 players)" it says "You are not eligible for that challenge."

Yeah that's the bug TH10 helped me track down. I'm inclined to just ignore that instance of it since luckily Derwi's score was middle/top of the pack, but not a win.

Also I just fixed the bug that prevented looking at older challenges. While I was at it I changed the behavior of the page so that clicking on a date shows that date and the 30 prior challenges, so you can effectively go backward as far as you want.

PS, now you can do things like this:

http://triplechain.net/challenges/25

To see how I got all my challenge wins (cringe-worthy gameplay warning!)