July 2023 Updates
Game Picking Formula Change
vsBadminton picks games by attempting to balance three requirements:
- Everyone gets a fair amount of games
- The games are varied
- The games are reasonably balanced
There have been a few changes recently: small ones to the “variety” target, mostly to make it less likely that you are playing against the same opponent multiple times, and the change to the “balance” target that was mentioned last month.
There is a larger new change to the “fairness” target. Previously this worked on number of games played, and amount of time waiting. This generally was OK but didn’t always compensate properly when players arrived during a session. It also depended on knowing when games started and finished, which is difficult for a user running a busy session to provide accurately.
The new formula aims to equalize how many games each player plays, relative to the amount of time they have been present. This means that a player arriving in the middle of the session will be treated as if she has already had the average number of games of players who were there from the start.
There is also a button on the Admin screen that shows the players who are waiting, ordered by how much they are “overdue” for a game, represented by a score. In essence, every game you play drops that by a hundred points, and it goes up for the time you are in the session, so the average is zero. vsBadminton won’t necessarily pick the four at the top of the list, because it is balancing with the other requirements, but it is unlikely to pick someone with a much lower waiting score.
Court Labels
vsBadminton has started assigning court numbers to games; however not every venue provides numbered courts 1..N. Maybe court 1 is occupied, or maybe they are labelled A, B, C…
You can now label the courts from the admin screen, and the games screen will show the labels you assign. By default they are the same as the court number, so you will not see any change unless you go and change the court labels.
The labels should ideally be a single character. Two could be OK, but more than that and the screen will be a mess.
You can also change the court of any game on the game screen. Note that it doesn’t check if the court is free, so if you want to, for instance, swap two games around you have to manually change both of them.
As always, feedback on the changes or other issues with the application is very welcome