EventLink Release Notes: September 28, 2021

By Bill Stark, EventLink Product Manager

Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Prerelease has come and gone, and I’m happy to report we maintained our EventLink and Companion up-time records of 100 percent. Now that we’re through the big event weekend it’s time to update you on our latest release. Here’s what you’ll see using EventLink now.

Prerelease Credit for Player List Only Events

If you’ve used EventLink since the Prerelease, you probably noticed a reminder to “Start” any Prerelease events you set up during the Prerelease using the “Player List Only” event structure. Why is it important to “start” these events, even if there are no rounds played? Because it ensures you get credit for attendance at those events, which in turn helps make sure your future Prerelease product allocations are sized appropriately. If you missed it, here’s what it looks like:

Read more about running Player List Only events from the knowledge base here.

Introducing: Power Pairings

When originally designed, EventLink’s pairing system used a traditional Swiss pairing system for its Swiss pairings. After receiving feedback we’re tweaking that algorithm slightly by introducing “power pairings.” The new Swiss pairing system matches what has been used in the past for events in stores and in premier play by adjusting the final round of pairings to pair players by ranking. For example, in an eight-player event, your final round pairings would be:

1st place versus 2nd place

3rd place versus 4th place

5th place versus 6th place

7th place versus 8th place

In the event a player has already played the opponent they would be paired against, the system will instead skip a spot and pair them against the next rated player.

Printing Player Lists

Thanks to feedback from many retailers, we’ve implemented the ability to print player lists from the registration phase of your events. You can use this list to verify who has paid for admittance to the event, take attendance, or even assign a random door prize. To print a player list at any phase of your event, select the “gear” options menu and choose, “Print Player List.”

Calendar Highlight

A small quality of life improvement we had time to sneak in this release was a visual highlight in Event Creation that allows you to quickly tell at a glance what the current day of the month is. Here’s what it looks like:

Improved Companion App Privacy

To ensure privacy for your customers using events in the Companion app, you’ll see a new change to how information is displayed. Moving forward in-person events will display only first and last names of players while online or at-home events will display only digital display names. If an event displays one type of information, it won’t display the other type.

Assigned Seating Any Time

Both players and WPN members have reached out to say they enjoy the “assigned seat” feature in EventLink that allows you to assign a single player to one seat throughout an entire tournament. We’ve now improved this feature to allow you to assign a seat at any point in your event instead of only during player registration.

To do so after the event has started, simply return to the Registration screen and assign the seat to the desired player by clicking the seat icon next to a player’s name.

Bugs

Here are some of the bugs we squashed in our latest release.

• Cross-pod booster drafts now pair cross-pod in all rounds, instead of maintaining first-round within-pod integrity. This removes the possibility of multiple byes in the first round.


• Players being able to sometimes be paired in additional rounds after being dropped has been resolved.


• The round timer has been tweaked to reduce latency when a user switches browser tabs or when their computer goes to sleep.

Up Next

I’m pleased to report the team will soon begin work on the Two-Headed Giant feature in EventLink. That will wrap up the last major feature focus for 2021, though we’ll have lots of smaller items we’ll be continuing to work on.