Conquer Club

Hi all,

Due to the myriad organisational requirements of tournaments, whether league or knockout, and the limited time Tournament Organisers have on their hands, I have decided to begin work on a Tournament Toolkit for all to use. It takes a long time to organise various aspects of tournaments, and can be a pain keeping track of them all. The interface I am creating will be able to keep track of multiple tournaments, and I hope to include features to cover every aspect of tournament organising that the community can think of. I am writing it in Excel VBA, and will feature a simple point-and-click interface requiring no knowledge of Excel itself.

Please reply to this thread with the features you would like added. You don't have to know about programming, just tell me what things are painful and time-consuming, and I will work them into the interface, so you don't have to pull your hair out, or keep messy files or papers with makeshift records here there and everywhere

CURRENT FUNCTIONALITY
League fixture calculator

• Equal distribution of home and away matches
• Matches follow home-away-home-away pattern as much as mathematically possible for every team
• Accepts up to 40 teams (this can extended easily enough)
• Presents in a simple text copy-paste format that can be dumped straight into a forum post
• Takes just seconds to calculate all games for a league

Auto-Game Creator

• Selection of all current maps and game types, for up to 65000 separate games
• Interfaces directly with CCs Start A Game page
• Takes only 1-2 seconds per game to create a game. Create 100 games in 2 minutes with one click of a mouse
• Can process lists automatically generated by League Fixture Calculator

TO DO LIST

• Simple league table organiser with win/draw/loss entry
• Tiered league table organiser with promotion/relegation
• Parallel league table organiser with play-offs
• Single elimination knockout
• Double elimination knockout
• List of all CC maps with stats on how long particular game configurations typically last for
• Record all game details, with url links to games
• Record which players have been PM'd, which have replied, etc.

PM me if you want a copy of what I have so far.

There is also a Tournament Handbook located at: http://www.conquerclub.com/forum/viewto ... 90&t=45946

Gilligan wrote:There is also a Tournament Handbook located at: http://www.conquerclub.com/forum/viewto ... 90&t=45946

Yep, and it's a great resource. I am addressing point 8 of that list:

Tournament Handbook wrote:Congratulations, the hard part is over!!!! Now, just simply keep track of all the games.

It's not as simple as you'd think That's where this tool will come in

e_i_pi wrote:

Gilligan wrote:There is also a Tournament Handbook located at: http://www.conquerclub.com/forum/viewto ... 90&t=45946

Yep, and it's a great resource. I am addressing point 8 of that list:

Tournament Handbook wrote:Congratulations, the hard part is over!!!! Now, just simply keep track of all the games.

It's not as simple as you'd think That's where this tool will come in

I'm not telling you to stop by any means. It was for players coming in and I was just giving them some more info

This looks really cool, but with the Leagues will we be able to add extras, like Home Wins - Away Wins - Home Loss - Away Loss
So then it isn't a set format.

max is gr8 wrote:This looks really cool, but with the Leagues will we be able to add extras, like Home Wins - Away Wins - Home Loss - Away Loss
So then it isn't a set format.

Everything players want, I can put in.

At the moment, this project is on tentative hold. Mostly because I want to finish off Antarctica map, keep stats database/thread up to date, and keep my tournament up to date so the players don't get sad. If people are interested in this, I'm happy to tailor it to their needs. At the moment it's a little dry, interface-wise, but if I get interest in it, I'll kick it up a notch. BAM.

There will be great interest in this, e_i_pi, I'm excited to see what you come up with.

Ditto with OP, it will allow tournaments with larger numbers of games to be easily ran.

max is gr8 wrote:Ditto with OP, it will allow tournaments with larger numbers of games to be easily ran.

Dear god, man! Where did you learn to speak English?

Optimus Prime wrote:

max is gr8 wrote:Ditto with OP, it will allow tournaments with larger numbers of games to be easily ran.

Dear god, man! Where did you learn to speak English?

He's from the United Kingdom, go easy on the chap. He can't help it that he's not a native speaker unlike the rest of Europe.

I didn't learn to speak english. I'm mute, bet you didn't know that

It would be a far better excuse if that were true but OP, my English for my coursework is worth A*. I'm doing Something right

Quote above text for added effects...

max is gr8 wrote:I didn't learn to speak english. I'm mute, bet you didn't know that

It would be a far better excuse if that were true but OP, my English for my coursework is worth A*. I'm doing Something right

Such wit! Such verve! You truly are god's gift to the internet.

The British educational system has been caught in a downward spiral for years, so it's safe to assume you got that A for being able to jot your name down correctly on the test paper. Well done.

Thankyou Frop, It's good to know that I wrote three pages only needing 3 words.

Come on, guys, keep it on topic. This is rude!

Eipi (do you mind without the _'s?), is there a way to get the tool already or is it just in progress?

ditto, then we can report bugs etc, after seeing the format.

Hi e_i_pi, still busy with this tool ?

Is it possible to add a function in the tool for added to a list of game numbers some basic details of the game.
Normally it is pretty fast to check who has won (although for a lot of games also that will take some time), but I am also interested to get a list in who was eliminated first, who was second, who third, etc. Now I have to load entire datalog and start searching for them.
Other details could also be interesting as well. For instance which round number did each player reach.

As soon as I can get all this kind of information automatically, I am sure I would like some more details. So to my opinion it would be best if you make it like a kind of shopping list from which I can pick the details I think might be helpful for a specific tournament (I have not run so many tournaments yet. So my shopping list is not complete. Just put all possible interesting things at the shopping list.)

amazzony wrote:Come on, guys, keep it on topic. This is rude!

Eipi (do you mind without the _'s?), is there a way to get the tool already or is it just in progress?

Sorry amazzony (and everyone else who's been replying to this thread). I've been very busy lately, and have wanted to get Antarctica done to the next version, which I have now. I will be working on this tool over the next few days. The first version will be able to run simple knockout tournaments of 2^n players, and leagues with any number of players.

Again, apologies about the delays, I took on a bit much 2 months ago, and have had trouble getting around to everything, but this is the next CC project to be dealt with now

No problem! Take your time and work with this when you have time and wish to do it, not when you feel that you must

Okay, just as a teaser, I've upped the round robin calculator to the web. It's just a back-end part of the Toolkit, but it's handy, and I thought I'd put something up.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=41b6 ... b9a8902bda

It's in Excel, and you'll have to Enable Macros when it pops up saying that it's like a virus, or trojan or something. Don't worry, it's not a trojan or virus, that's just Microsoft getting all upset at people taking control

It's pretty straight forward, but here's the instructions:

• List the players in the league. You need at least 3 players (otherwise it's a knockout )
• Click in the box labelled 'League Round Number'
• Change the number to whichever round of the league you want fixtures for

The program assumes a perpetual league, so once everyone has played each other once, they play each other again in the same order, but with the home-away side switched around. Once those games run out, it starts from the beginning again.

e_i_pi. One thing I would like is for the program to use Excel's updatey web monitorey thingy to collect the results of the games created, pool them into the brackets etc. and automatically create the new games. That may sound a bit complicated, but it would when you think about it, it would help. You could even extend that feature to send PMs to all people notifying them about their games. If that's possible. But yeah, you could make an account specifically for sending those PMs. One thing I hate about the tournament I'm doing currently is the PMs. As in HATE.

milner94 wrote:e_i_pi. One thing I would like is for the program to use Excel's updatey web monitorey thingy to collect the results of the games created, pool them into the brackets etc. and automatically create the new games. That may sound a bit complicated, but it would when you think about it, it would help. You could even extend that feature to send PMs to all people notifying them about their games. If that's possible. But yeah, you could make an account specifically for sending those PMs. One thing I hate about the tournament I'm doing currently is the PMs. As in HATE.

Yeah I hear ya. Collecting the information of finished games is most likely not possible to do via Excel, but setting out the future games, creating them, and sending out PMs can all be automated.

Changing the number in the box doesn't do anything. I select the box, and type in a new number and it just adds it next to whatever number is already in there and doesn't do anything else. Where am I going wrong?

Optimus Prime wrote:Changing the number in the box doesn't do anything. I select the box, and type in a new number and it just adds it next to whatever number is already in there and doesn't do anything else. Where am I going wrong?

You need to enable macros when loading the sheet. When you see this splash box...

...you have to click enables macros for it to work. If it still doesn't work, can you post what version of Excel you are running?

Unless the number you added was 9, to make it 19. Round 19 looks identical to round 1 in a 10 player league, which is the default setting

e_i_pi wrote:

Optimus Prime wrote:Changing the number in the box doesn't do anything. I select the box, and type in a new number and it just adds it next to whatever number is already in there and doesn't do anything else. Where am I going wrong?

You need to enable macros when loading the sheet. When you see this splash box...

...you have to click enables macros for it to work. If it still doesn't work, can you post what version of Excel you are running?

Unless the number you added was 9, to make it 19. Round 19 looks identical to round 1 in a 10 player league, which is the default setting

I did enable macros when the box popped up, and I'm running Office Mac 2004 edition of Excel. Perhaps it just doesn't work with my software.