I would like to hear what people who have run the Tournament Manager software have to say about it.
Best put this discussion in EventPartners part of the forum who rely on TM.
I’m honestly not sure there’s much point in having this thread at all:
- There really isn’t an alternative to Tournament Manager
- The best way to give feedback about TM is by emailing [email protected]
- As @lacsap mentioned, you will probably get better insights in the EP forum (that you don’t have access to) than here in the public forum
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Hi,
We are running a VEX IQ competition for primary schools in March and I am having some difficulties with the VEX Tournament Manager Software.
We will have 9 teams competing. We are planning to use 4 x Arena which will have 8 teams competing simultaneously (i.e. 4 alliances taking part at any one time – 2 teams per arena) and 1 team waiting out.
We have setup the TM software with 4 x Field Sets and 1 field/arena per Field Set. When I generate the match schedule the software schedules the same team in two different arena at the same time (e.g. Team 4 in Arena 1 and Arena 3 at 10:45am).
Is there a different configuration that I should be using? (i.e. Number of Field Sets / Fields).
Also, we are allowing 2 minutes for each qualification match. However the Driver Changeover audio beep in the software signals with 35 seconds remaining, instead of 65 seconds. Is there a way to change the Drive Changeover signal to set it to at 65 seconds and 55 seconds?
I would be grateful for any assistance you could provide.
Well, with what you describe, you’re waaaay out of the VIQC Challenge format and the TM is obviously not ready for that. Tournament matches are being run one-by-one and the best way to speed them up is to rotate/pipeline over 3 fields - with extreme 1:30 cycle, you have 4:30 per field - 1min for a match, 30s to score (and now you start another match on the next field), 2 minutes for reset and 1 minute to rotate in the next alliance. And you only need one set of (soon-super-tired) referees. Even if you tried to run the matches in parallel, you won’t get any faster - scoring, reset and rotation would still need to happen for each field, but you’d need 3x reset crew, 3x referees, …
(been there, done that - I have once organized a skills-only tournament for about 30 teams, where we had 5 fields running at the same time, but that was skills, so no alliances, no fixed order, no scheduling, just wait in line for your next turn)
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TM exists to run events to the VRC and VIQC format. Things like changing the match time are not an option.
Whatnyou are changing is the cycle time, the time between one match starting and the next match starting.
For such an unusual format, you would need to creat your own schedules and timers and not use TM.
Your problems is not enough teams. If you had 34 teams then the schedule would be fine and teams would get spread out. With 9 teams, I’d run no more than 2 tables.
TM lets you build a lot of things, but you need to deal with the Games it’s designed for.
TM is head above any tournament software that I’ve seen.
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Thanks for the replies guys - I’ll revisit the schedule 