Help text to explain tournament settings

I think it would be beneficial, and low-effort, to add some kind of helptext (hovertext, hyperlink, whatever) to explain the mechanics of various tournament structures and pairing methods.

This would be good to at least see on the tournament detail pages themselves, so that players understand what to expect from tournaments they join.

I haven’t set up a tournament myself, but I imagine something similar would be helpful in the tournament creation UI (if not already present), so that tournament creators have some guidance on appropriate choices. I’ve seen (well, am in) one or two tournaments where the choices seem pretty strange and I tend to suspect that the creator didn’t quite understand what they were choosing and what it would imply for how the tournament plays out.

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See also: OGS Doco/wiki#Tournaments. It doesn’t answer everything in your post but there’s some relevant information there.

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I think it’s difficult to write more details about how some of the tourney types work (eg Mcmahon in particular) because no-one actually knows.

From time to time there are questions like "why did such and such happen in my McMahon tournament and I can’t remember seeing them get answered.

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Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that wiki material. It’s certainly good that it’s there, but I agree that it falls well short of answering questions most players would be likely to have.

Well, if it’s implemented in software, then the author of that software would have understood it at least – and someone else with access to the code could also consult it to investigate questions.

Really though, I don’t think the basic need here requires delving minutiae. I’m just talking about concise explanations of the different tournament structures and pairing methods. I’ve seen e.g. people in lobbies for McMahon tournaments asking in chat about why the scores can’t all be initially zero. They’re not clueless – it’s a niche bit of knowledge, and the site’s not helping make it discoverable. I really don’t think an elementary attempt at this would be very much trouble, and it would address most of the common-case needs.

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You can read about how normal McMahon works in various places - google knows.

It definitely could be useful to link up to that from our wiki.

I wouldn’t write about how our McMahon works based on this though - I think we know that the code has quirks, and only one person has access to that … who did not not necessarily write it.

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So sad…

On the scale of sad things, I would have barely rated this :smiley:

People use it, we have tournies, the world continues… :wink:

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