All pages showing faction statistics have been reworked. The main purpose of this change is to simplify further development by making the different Tourney Grounds sites share more code. There are however a couple of changes that are worth noting here, relating to the main faction statistics page of the sites:
More statistics are now displayed when filtering on parts of a faction (e.g. just the faction or agenda on The Jousting Pavilion).
A new filter option allows setting an "average values cut-off" which lets you ignore outliers that has too few samples to be statistically meaningful (leaving it up to you to decide what that number is). This will affect all charts that display average values.
For The Lotus Pavilion there are also a lot of new charts, since the faction statistics available on that site before this change was more rudimentary. It now benefits from getting all the same charts that the The Jousting Pavilion has had for a long time.
There has been a small change on the site in that it now displays the actual date when a tournament finished ( rather than the number of days since it finished). The site will try to display the correct local date based on the tournament's listed country, but for some countries that span multiple time zones the displayed date may in some odd cases be off by one day. (Since the site only knows the country and not the exact time zone.)
More importantly perhaps, one should note that all other use of dates on the site will use UTC time, which may then differ from the displayed date. E.g. dates used for statistical periods, the filtering of results, or dates returned by the API; these are all working by UTC time and does not take the tournament location into account.
Information about the players' selected factions will no longer be shown until the tournament has started. This is to prevent players from being able to scout the field ahead of time. This affects the tournament scoreboard, as well as the API and the graph data for statistics. Tournament organizers can still see and edit the selected factions of the signed up players, however.
Tournament organizers can now assign other users as staff to their tournaments. Tournament staff members have the same access level as the tourmanet organizer, and can help manage the tournament by registering players, entering results, or any other organizer task. This should allow larger tournaments to give the full organizer crew access to managing the tournament, without the need to share a single account between them.
Tournament staff is managed from the "Edit Staff" page, which you can find a link to on the "Edit Tournament" page, under the "More Actions" section.
The input fields for entering player profiles by name have received an update with two new UI elements added. The first element is a clickable link to the player profile that the entered name represents. The second is a button for cycling through more suggestions with the prefix so far entered.
The player profile link () verifies that there is an existing player profile with this name (and includes its numeric player ID in small print). To double check that it is the correct player profile, you can click on the link and it will open the player profile page in a new window (to not interrupt your work on the current page). A missing link means that a new player profile with this name will be created.
The button lets you find more player profiles with the same prefix. To cycle backwards you can hold the Shift key when clicking the button. There are also keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+Space and Ctrl+Backspace for cycling forward and backward, respectively. Note that there is a limit on how many player profiles that are fetched for every prefix, so try to be fairly precise before you start searching for alternatives.
The suggestion algorithm is case insensitive and will allow alternative characters with or without diacritical marks, otherwise it is fairly strict and will only match names with the same prefix.
As always, please let me know if something doesn't seem to work as it should.
// Petter
Site moderators can now add new factions (typically Agendas for Thrones and Strongholds for L5R) directly through the site. Head over to the Admin section if you are a moderator and check out the Factions page, which has more information.
As a result of a policy change on Facebook, it is no longer possible for us to use Facebook as an identity provider. This means that all site accounts that used Facebook to sign in can no longer do so, effective as of now! (Currently, Facebook still seems to work for The Lotus Pavilion, but that should only be a temporary respite.)
If you are using Facebook to sign in to the site and want to retain access to your account, you will have to switch to a different identity provider:
If you are currently signed in you can go to the "Settings" page of your player profile, and use the "Add Identity Provider" button to link another identity provider. Do not sign out from the site before you've done this, as you will then be locked out of your account!
If you are not signed in you are locked out of your account. You must create a new account by signing in with a different identity provider that you have credentials for. Then you must go to the profile page of your old account and click the "Claim Ownership" button, to merge your old results with your new account. (This request needs to be approved by a moderator before taking effect, so be patient or contact one of the moderators to speed up the process.)
I apologize for this massive inconvenience!
Your admin,
Petter
Some changes have happened to make it easier for signed in users to find and report their current games on the site.
You will now see banner notifications about your current games on the start page and on tournament specific pages.
If the tournament allows players to report their own game results, the message will include a link to the "Report Game Results" page.
There is a new option on your user "Settings" page that lets you disable all banners about your current games, should you not like this new feature.
The menu available on tournament pages has been tweaked slightly for improved visibility.
- Some of the more uncommon organizer actions can now be found under the "Edit Tournament" page instead of directly from the menu.
A link to the tournament's "Report Game Results" page can now be included in the generated QR links, available to organizers from the tournament's "Info" page, if the tournament allows players to report their own game results.
(Yes, the new banners will likely be annoying for those of you that have really old games on the site that were never properly finished. Please bug the organizer to finish or remove them, or use the disable functionality.)
Hope it helps someone!
A couple of feature requests have been implemented today!
The first one being a new "Multiple Games Per Round" option that makes it easier to run tournaments where players are allowed to play multiple games per round (think online tournaments where each round can span several days, or weeks). With this option checked, Tourney Grounds will no longer assume there has been some mistake when the same player is paired twice in the same round, leaving you free to pair the round as you please in this regard.
(However, this remain a not wholly supported type of Tourney Grounds tournament. The scoring for one thing becomes heavily skewed towards favoring those who play more games than those who play fewer. For that reason, moderators are likely to review such tournaments as suspicious. The visualisation of games on the site also becomes hard to follow when the one game per round rule is broken. Still, we think it is great if the Tourney Grounds site is flexible enough to cater to many alternative formats!)
Secondly, Tourney Grounds will now allow you to start an elimination bracket that fits all players in the tournament, if you so wish. If there are not enough opponents for everyone to fill the bracket, the top seeds are given a BYE in the first elimination round. (The same as how the Record-Based Elimination Rounds already work.)
Happy gaming!
Just a heads up that the old domain names thejoustingpavilion.com and thelotuspavilion.com are no longer supported, and they will not be renewed when they expire (as already happened for The Lotus Pavilion).
Update your scripts and bookmarks to the current URLs:
That's all!
It is now possible to add and remove identity providers for your user account. While signed in, go to My Settings on your player page to see the new ID Providers settings. This should hopefully make it easier to replace one identity provider with another, as new options are added to the site or as your preferences change.
We're moving in together! The Jousting Pavilion and The Lotus Pavilion are leaving their old domain names (thejoustingpavilion.com and thelotuspavilion.com) behind to move in together under the common name tourneygrounds.com.
The full URLs going forward will be:
- The Jousting Pavilion: https://thrones.tourneygrounds.com
- The Lotus Pavilion: https://l5r.tourneygrounds.com
Don't forget to update your bookmarks!
Links to the old domain names will continue to work during a transition period by forwarding all requests to the new domain names. At some point in the future, the old domain names will be discontinued entirely.
The rationale for this move is to minimize the amount of administration and costs associated with having multiple domain names. It should also lower the threshold to launch new Tourney Grounds sites that cater to other games in the future.
System upgrades
We are also using this move as an opportunity to upgrade multiple parts of our tech stack, which had become fairly antiquated, to up-to-date versions. This ensures that the Tourney Grounds sites are ready for the future!
As always, however, please report any issues that might have slipped in with these upgrades!
Feedback
Questions? Comments? Leave a post on Facebook!
Two new identity providers have been added to the site: Discord and Github
These options are now available from the sign in page, together with the previous identity providers Facebook and Google.
Users that want to switch identify provider can sign in with their new identity and search for their old player profile. From your old registered player profile page, click the This is me! button. You will then be forwarded to the login page where you have to sign in using the identity provider and account details of the old player profile, to confirm that it is you. If successful, you will be able to use the new identity provider to sign in with your player profile going forward! The old account details are removed from the site.
I'm happy to announce some major updates to the Pavilion sites today! Check out this video recording where I try to show what these changes are all about, or read on for a written summary.
User Accounts and Player Profiles
The separation that has existed between user accounts, that authenticate your identity on the site using third-party providers (Facebook or Google), and player profiles that participate in tournaments, has been removed. User accounts now also function as player profiles, and will be known as registered players. Player profiles that are not associated with a user account will be known as unregistered players.
For registered players this means a greater degree of control and ownership of their player profile.
Self Sign Up and Printable Tournament Links
Because players can now sign in to the site with their player profile, some changes have been made to the tournament option that allows players to sign themselves up to a tournament. This option is now called Open Sign Up and allows registered players to enter the tournament with their signed in player profile. It is no longer possible for players to sign up under an arbitrary player name. (But the TO can still sign up arbitrary player names to the tournament, just like before.)
To further simplify this process of letting players sign themselves up to your tournament, the Tournament Info page now includes QR codes that links to the tournament or the tournament sign up page. These QR codes easily be printed and put on a wall for your players to scan using a smart phone or similar device.
A similar change also apply to the Open Game Reports option. With this option, game results can be entered by signed in players only, and then only for their own games.
Petitions for Player Profile Mergers
With all existing player profiles now being unregistered players, some of you will likely want to merge your old player profile into your registered player profile. Luckily, this process has now been formalized into a new petitioning system!
When you are signed in to the site and visit an unregistered player profile page you can now press the button that says, This is me! This will then create a petition for your claim, which must be approved by a site moderator (to provide some measure of control of who claims to be who). Once approved the claimed profile will be merged into yours. You can list and manage all your petitions from your player profile page.
- Note that there is currently no e-mail notifications in place for the petitioning system, so you will not be notified when your petition is handled. You can always reach out to one of the site staff and interact with them directly if needed.
Achievements
There is now a list of achievements on the site that you can work towards! Find the achievements from your player profile page, and see what achievements your friends have unlocked on theirs. You can also show off the achievement you are most proud of by including it as a title in the header of your player profile pages!
Larger tournaments can also award players with custom achievements designed by the TO. Check out the video recording above for more details about this feature.
(Note that the list of achievements for The Lotus Pavilion is very limited at the time this is released, and serve only as a placeholder. The ambition is to create more evocative achievements that fit with the lore of Legend of the Five Rings in the future. Hopefully with some help from the community!)
Patreon Recognition
Long overdue, we are now able to properly recognize those who support (or have supported) this site on our Patreon page! Site patrons can now connect with their Patreon account from the Settings page of ther player profile when signed in to the site.
Registered patrons will then receive some extra perks on the site, which are listed here!
Feedback
Questions? Comments? Leave a post on Facebook!
Problems
If you experience any problems, try doing a force refresh of the page. That will make sure you are not using any cached scripts or styles that are outdated.
There is a new option to merge multiple tournaments into one. Merging tournaments is useful when you have multiple tournaments happening at different times that function as qualifiers for a graduated cut. (If all your qualification games are played at the same time you would be better off with one tournament that use the option, "Pair players within the same team during swiss rounds, treating each team as a separate pod.") The typical example of this are the FFG Worlds tournaments, with a Day 1A and a Day 1B leading up to a Day 2 where the best players from both days progress to a graduated cut of either more swiss rounds or directly to elimination rounds.
Find the "Merge Tournaments" button in the tournament page menu.
The custom pairings option has been expanded with an optional text form. When used it allows the tournament organizer to enter their custom pairings as plain text, instead of editing the pairings in the round editor.
There is a new tournament option available to always pair players within the same team during swiss rounds, treating each team as a separate pod. If you select this option, swiss rounds will be paired separately for each team. Players not belonging to a team will not be paired at all with this option selected, so make sure you assign all players to a team. Elimination rounds are still paired normally with this option, so you can have a cut with the top players from each pod. (If you want to have a graduated cut of additional swiss rounds with players from all pods, you must disable the option in the tournament edit form after playing the preliminary pod rounds.)
The default tournament scoreboard will show the standings for each pod with the new option selected. You can choose to view the overall standings instead by selecting the appropriate option from the Select scoreboard menu.
The text import of players in the tournament creation form has been updated to make it more clear what format it expects, and to allow additional information about team and first round bye to be included. The algorithm that deduces a valid faction string from the input has also been rewritten, and should now be better at guessing what you mean. Let me know if you find any weird behavior!
The Pavilion Points have been updated again! The update to Pavilion Points from last week received some criticism from smaller play groups that felt it excluded them from the opportunity to gain Pavilion Points. While the aim is still to shift the relative weight of Pavilion Points from smaller to larger tournaments, this new update instead focuses on increasing the reward for larger tournaments rather than decreasing them for smaller tournaments.
Check out the FAQ for details on the updated Pavilion Points system!
These are considerably larger changes to the system than what was done last week, but hopefully they can also be accepted as fair by a larger part of the community.
There is now a news section on the site -- this is it!
Starting today, all updates on the site will be announced here. Links will still be posted to the Facebook page, for greater reach and to have a place for people to comment and give feedback. Feel free to share those posts in other relevant Facebook groups!
Check out the new Player Opponents page!
Taking inspiration from Agotstats and the currently defunct Isle of Ravens sites, there is now a new page that lists the game results of a player grouped by opponent. Find out who is your nemesis now by clicking the Player Opponents button on your player profile page.
Following a post I made on Facebook about the player performances on The Jousting Pavilion in 2018, there was a bit of discussion about the Pavilion Points and what they represented. A majority of the feedback from that post had the general notion that Pavililon Points should be shifted more towards larger tournaments. After much debating back and forth I have decided to only do a minor tweak to the scoring system, which will remove some points from the smallest tournaments, as follows: 1 point was previously given to the winner of 6-7 player tournaments but now require 8-11 players, and 2+1 points has shifted from the 8-15 range to the 12-15 range. For tournaments of 16 players and up the scoring remain the same.
In addition to this, the "Top Players" term has been replaced with "Star Players" to better reflect that this ranking is not necessarily about player skills. It should be seen as a celebration of those players who have had excellent performances at both casual and competitive tournaments.
For my own recollection here are some of the ideas that almost made it, and the reason for why they didn't:
Award bonus points to Formal and Premier events: This makes a lot of sense. But it also makes the scoring more questionable, as it would then rely on the tournament organizers to enter the correct tier. Adding a requirement that the tournament must be marked as legitimate by a moderator doesn't really solve anything but just shifts the problem.
Award an extra point to a player that goes undefeated: This would be cool, but it isn't applicable to tournament reports where the individual games are missing, so we would then have a scoring that was biased towards tournaments ran on the site.