Release Notes: June 22, 2021

By Bill Stark, EventLink Product Manager

The latest release from EventLink pushes several big improvements out into the world. Let’s start with our most highly requested new functionality.

Multi-Event Creation

I’m incredibly excited to announce the delivery of the next phase of our multi-event creation features in EventLink! I debuted how the designs worked previously and that functionality is now fully available. Quickly copy and duplicate events using official event templates, even in regions with Covid-19 restrictions in place. The final phase of the work will improve the scheduling of certain types of events, like Friday Night Magic, over longer stretches of time but for now you can schedule up to 10 events all at once.

Improved Name Privacy

Our continued efforts to improve player privacy completed in our latest release. Now your players’ names appear only in the medium they expect: for an online event a player’s display name appears while for a tabletop event a player’s first and last name will appear. These changes impact all the remaining areas of EventLink in which a player’s name displays for an event.

Game-Level Draws

Game-level draws are now available in EventLink. These draws utilize the third field in results entry information. For example a record of 0-0-1 denotes a single game draw with no wins or losses. You may record up to 9 game-level draws in a single match using EventLink. Game-level draws will be coming to Companion soon; for now, if your players need to record such a result, they can ask for tournament staff to help them do so. If a player mistakenly reports their result as “1-1” in Companion when they intended to record “1-1-1,” you or your event staff can always make changes to that score in EventLink.

Timer Upgrades

The EventLink timer now counts up in “negative time” after it reaches 00:00. This enables users to track how much extra time has passed in the round for managing things like extra turns. It also fixes an issue that caused the “end round” sound to chime whenever a user loaded a page with a timer on 00:00 even if the chime had already sounded previously.

Bugs

Here are the major bugs we tackled in this sprint:

• An issue in the Companion app sometimes led to players being added to events in EventLink without a first or last name. The issue has been fixed. If a player in your event appears with no first or last name, remove them from the Companion App Lobby and have them re-enter after updating their app and logging back in, or enter them using their Wizards Account directly


• The bug that caused “midnight” events to show up at 12:00 a.m. on the following day has been fixed. You can now schedule your midnight events at midnight.


• In order to “delete round” you must pass a safety check that requires you to type the word “Delete.” That was briefly not being enforced but has been fixed.


• An issue that caused match slips to display “alphabetically” instead of numerically has been fixed. Your slips will now display 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.

What’s Up Next

Here are five features we’re working on now that will be arriving in the coming weeks and months:

• Our next big feature push is an additional option for adding players who have played in your events before but are unable to use the Companion app. The design phase of this feature is complete and I demo’ed how it’s going to look in this prior update. We’re now working on the first implementation step, with the full feature on track to deliver no later than September.


• Dropping players before an event begins is a big quality of life improvement that has been on our backlog for several sprints and is finally underway. We expect this to ship, barring any surprises, in our next release in early July


• Mobile upgrades to EventLink are on their way! Our team is hard at work on the first portion focusing on the calendar. You’ll see EventLink get easier to use on screens of all sizes every two weeks throughout the summer until the entire experience is upgraded.


• Companion users who wish to late register in the app will soon be able to do so. We expect to complete this feature by the end of the quarter.


• Two popularly requested quality of life feature improvements will soon reach Companion: a die roller just in time for Adventures in the Forgotten Realms in July, and the round timer display in the app set to deliver in mid-August.