We’ve been preparing our Online Series for about four weeks now but it came to a sudden halt this weekend. We tried to prepare ourselves and all our participants as good as possible but in the end some issues came up we didn’t anticipate and 1300 players facing a completely new experience didn’t help either.
If you want to know what happened in more detail, here’s a quick rundown. After registration closed we had to change the tournament settings to enable a check in because it wasn’t possible to lock player information otherwise. However we didn’t just turn on the one time check in we did manually for all players but unintentionally also made it mandatory for every player to check into their round within a certain time, which therefore wasn’t mentioned in our rule document. The amount of confusion created by this was breathtaking. Hundreds of games got reported simultaneously, turning the dashboard for unsettled disputes into a unnavigable mess. It wasn’t possible to see which match was already taken care of by a judge, the table numbering wasn’t orderable to communicate responsibilities and many games got reported again and again even after a judge had resolved them. This resulted in some games being attended by multiple judges while others were overlooked and ultimately created a long overtime. During this process loading times for entering and leaving flagged matches got longer and longer. Throughout round two the general chaos became less but loading times continued to rise until the site appeared to be frozen and most players and staff members couldn’t access it anymore. The Battlefy support was very responsive and worked on the issue right away but our delay had gotten to a point where we wouldn’t be able to finish the tournament in time. This combined with our general dissatisfaction about rounds one and two lead to the decision that we would have to postpone our first Qualifier, even though Battlefy managed to resolve their issue in a relatively timely manner.
While this was a very sad experience for all of us, we are nowhere near ready to give up! We started work on evaluating the event immediately and got in contact with other organizations to work on a more fine tuned way of handling online Pokémon events. While discussing with those platforms we decided to postpone our series by two weeks in order to fully figure out a new solution. At this point it isn’t clear yet, if we will stick to Battlefy or not but we have no doubt this will result in a much smoother event than we were able to provide yesterday.
Updated Schedule:
18.-19. April – Qualifier 1
02.-03. May – Qualifier 2
16.-17. May – Qualifier 3
30.-31. May – Qualifier 4
13.-14. June – Invitational
We will open up a new registration for the Qualifier. However, we also want to acknowledge everybody who had good results in the first tournament and are thinking about ways to do so.
We are very sorry if this weekend disappointed you but would nonetheless like to thank the amazing Staff Team that went through this with us and everyone that participated in or followed it. We will be back with more news as soon as possible.