Earlier this week, a Magic decide was confronted with a technical mess. The matchmaking software program used to coordinate all main Magic tournaments, its use extremely inspired by Wizards of the Coast, stopped working, resulting in delays and logistical complications for the gamers on the occasion and the judges mediating it. Miraculously, this decide was capable of finding an answer with a laptop computer, some coding expertise, and about an hour of time.

What went improper at this Magic Tournament?

This Magic decide’s story comes straight from a private weblog put up. The Level 2 decide, Elaine Cao, was on her means to assist average a event in Toronto by Face To Face Games, the most important Magic event group in Canada, on September 24. It wasn’t till the primary spherical of the event was supposed to start that issues arose. Eventlink, the webapp developed by Wizards of the Coast to generate event pairings, went out.

The issues solely acquired worse from there. Due to how the pairings are formatted, the judges could not simply manually print out the pairings. Simply broadcasting the pairings on a TV monitor would not work since Eventlink tabs would immediately crash past the primary spherical. Forwarding the knowledge to the gamers by way of a companion app wasn’t working both. As for simply including pairings manually utilizing Excel then importing them again into Eventlink, this system does not help guide pairing. It is a serious characteristic that many passionate followers need despite WOTC’s personal stance on the matter.  They even tried shifting the event to different webapps together with MTGMelee, Challonge, and even YuGiOh event software program. All of these purposes weren’t working both.

What was the Magic decide’s answer?

This is the place the story takes a flip. Cao, who had some programming expertise, puzzled if it was potential to shortly code event pairings in Python on her laptop computer. What adopted was roughly an hour of technical complications, quick coding, and a variety of logistical gymnastics. Aside from a quick energy outage, Cao’s efforts managed to get the event again underway.

First, it should be clear that Cao did not simply sort up a posh event pairing program that put Eventlink to disgrace. That form of complexity on such quick discover and with so little time is totally unfeasible. What occurred was that Cao was capable of code workable event pairings due to her understanding of how the event algorithm labored, in addition to bearing in mind edge circumstances like tiebreakers and dropped gamers. It additionally helped that Cao was in fixed communication with a number of judges all through the occasion and had her pal available together with her personal laptop computer and Google Sheets open to import the outcomes.

What occurred afterwards to the Magic decide?

Cao was acknowledged for her ingenuity on the occasion. Face to Face Games formally acknowledged her efforts, congratulating her efforts in a Twitter put up. They additionally acknowledged that Cao could be rewarded handsomely for her efforts, however that has not been publicly disclosed. As for Cao’s ideas on the matter, they had been fairly direct. The final paragraph of her put up has her saying to WOTC that each one of this might have been prevented if guide pairing was carried out into Eventlink.