[ncmncm]

I kept being distracted by the "why would anyone allow themselves to get so invested in a walled garden, especially one where the garden owner is so obviously hostile and non-responsive?"

I understand that literally millions get invested in various walled Microsoft, Apple, Google, and even Facebook gardens, not to mention McDonalds, Nintendo, etc. But that doesn't make the answer any clearer.

[themoonisachees]

The short answer is that Wizards Of The Coast has an extremely tight grip on all Magic The Gathering events.

To organize an mtg event, you must use their shitty app, otherwise you cannot be an official tournament, and AFAIK are actually forbidden from calling it an MTG event alltogether. Supposedly this is the nintendo way of doing things where under cover of "quality assurance" and under threat of trademark litigation, you can enforce a very tight grip on your product ecosystem.

The longer answer is that as a judge, OOP has no control over the solution " chosen "by tournament organisers and the org has no control over the solution imposed on them by wotc. Wotc in turn has no incentive to improve their product for a lack of viable competition and here you are.

[oritart]

The main value for Eventlink is that WotC tracks the playerbase of each tournament organizer and distributes promotional materials accordingly and awards higher status to larger organizers, so tournament organizers are heavily encouraged to use Eventlink so WotC can see the numbers.

Its not even that WotC has no incentive to improve their program; its more that the people in charge there have actively made the decision to not have certain features because they've decided that the nebulous possibility of abuse is more harmful than the concrete need to have certain features in place in order to fix things. Though the last project manager quit (got fired, if the rumours I've heard are true) and I've had a very long meeting with some of the current guys and they seem very open to change.

There are definitely tournament organizers who do not care about this and will simply run on a different platform, but F2F is not one of them.

[rcxdude]

Because said walled gardens can provide a lot of value. They can still be worthwhile to use despite the hostility of the owner. It's a negative in the consideration but not an absolute dealbreaker for most people.

[pastage]

Ads, group think and social belonging/inclusion. That is just stating the obvious, but yes the problems of this event came from the issues you list.

On a side I wonder why it is so hard to make event software like this. I looked at reimplementing a race manager used to track times for cars in Pinewood Derby rally for something akin to this, it take a lot of work to make it "usefull". Especially considering the index card solution mentioned for Swiss pairing seems to be such an easy concept when done manually.

The racing manager software was called DerbyNet, and works great for its purpose.

[david2ndaccount]

I was pretty into MTG when I was younger and had a very in-depth understanding of the rules (I could properly work out how layering work for example). I considered becoming a judge, but when I learned that they worked very long hours for free, I couldn’t understand why anyone would do it.