Release Notes: April 21, 2021

Strixhaven and EventLink

The Strixhaven Prerelease was a big milestone for EventLink and Companion: the very first time these tools would be the only option for managing Prerelease events globally. I’m very proud of the team’s extraordinary work over the past two years as both EventLink and Companion stood up to the challenge.

We had no outages, despite global traffic that exceeded all previous traffic records for both tools. Monitoring worked properly, allowing us to verify things were running smoothly.

To ensure all Prereleases reach the same level of success in the future, we will continue doing the following:

• 24/7 monitoring of all services to quickly alert us of any disruptions


• A "strike team" on call 24/7 to respond to any disruptions


• "Load testing" that allows us to test the system with many times more than the greatest number of users who have ever played Magic at the same time in the history of in-store play


• Building new features to improve how event management works for you, your employees, and your players

Thanks to all the WPN retailers around the world who’ve been with us on this journey so far. The teams are very excited to continue rolling out improvements and to ensure EventLink and Companion meet the needs of our communities everywhere.

Currency Improvements

Inspired by feedback directly from our users, the currency field in EventLink will soon update permanently when you change it. Previously it defaulted to the American dollar, or "USD," regardless of the currency you selected for past events.

Beginning around April 28, once an event has been created for your store with a currency code added, your currency will permanently default to that currency setting until you change it again. Those changes will also automatically display on the Store & Event locator.

Bugs

Thank you to users who took the time to report issues they’ve experienced while using EventLink and Companion. You can reach out directly to us using the feedback options in both products! We read every single piece of feedback that comes in.

Here are the latest bug fixes we’ve shipped:

• The Top 8 rounds of a Swiss event now appear with the proper titles in EventLink Mirror, the functionality that lets you project important information about your event onto screens at your event


• Based on feedback from our judge community, penalty order in the "penalties" section of EventLink has been adjusted to minimize accidentally assigning a significant penalty to a player

Up Next: Improvements to Event Scheduling

The team is hard at work on our next large feature improvement: easing the creation of events using event templates.

The design team has completed their designs, and the developers have begun implementing them. When complete, this update will allow EventLink users to be better informed about what in-store play programs are available for scheduling, as well as schedule many events simultaneously.

You’ll be able to automatically copy details from events, change anything that needs adjusting, and schedule them all at once!

We expect this feature will go live by the end of the second quarter, or sometime in May or June of this year.