Discord | Standard
Time: Tuesday March 24th, 2020 14:00-22:00
Players: 150
Role: Discord Customer Service Rep

What Even Is This?
At least, that's what I thought when I saw the application go up, but I wasn't doing anything else (just like the rest of the world) so I figured I'd throw my hat in and see what it was.

It's basically a PTQ being run through Magic: Arena. We had a HJ/scorekeeper and myself and one other person fielding player issues. For round one we also had the entire staff of the previous event, which was in round 6 and for the most part the players were done being problematic. How it works is we get people to sign up (just like a normal PTQ) then we get those people to submit online decklists (like a Grand Prix) then we put all the people into WLTR and generate pairings (just like a normal PTQ) and post them online. Then the weird part starts. The names on the pairings are peoples Discord usernames as well as their Arena usernames, the players then find their opponent on the pairings and challenge them on Magic Arena. After pairings went up players had about five minutes to figure all this out and then we'd start the round timer for 50 minutes (just like a normal PTQ). Players decklists were made visible as soon as round one pairings went up, so players would find their opponent then take a look at their opponents decklist during the match. The events were six rounds long and anyone that ended 5-1 or better would be qualified for a two day weekly championship, with Day One on Saturday and Day Two on Sunday with a giant prize pool.

So... What Is My Job?
Everyone in the tournament was in the Discord channel, which is how we would solve problems. This is where I come in. Players, being players will ruin everything always, and you need some people to be there to fix things. My first job, before the event started was poking all the players that had yet to submit decklists to, you know actually do so. The single most important thing you need to know is that the scorekeeper/HJ would tell you who to poke and you'd press ctrl + K to bring up a window in Discord where you'd type the players janky username. Yes, we did, in a professional setting have to say “excuse me, lilpissbaby, could you please submit your decklist? This would open a private chat window with the player. You'd poke them and sometimes they'd respond and... sometimes you'd see that they were playing League of Legends and you'd be like “whelp, don't know if they're ever getting back to me”.

The next job was posting in both the announcements channel and the general channel that the pairings were posted and when the round would start and end. We eventually adopted saying things like “round ends at x:017 and y:07” since a lot of the players were in different time zones. Then would come a torrent of players posing in both the help channel as well as the general tournament channel that they either couldn't connect to their opponent, or they couldn't find their opponent's decklist, or that the username for their opponent wasn't working. Usernames are case sensitive and WLTR likes to helpfully capitalize player names, this was a huge problem in the first few events. Most of the problems were players giving us the wrong usernames which also would need to be fixed in the first round.

We had one player whose name was __OGV__ and the underscores cause HUGE transcription issues, as Discord would automatically edit them out when the name was pasted into the chat window.

The IPG Lives Online Too!
Anyways for most of the player problems you'd poke the opponent and see if they were online and try to iron out what they'd tried (did you type the name in right, did you talk to your opponent, are you in the right mode? Did you try friending your opponent on Arena first?) if the opponent was unresponsive, they'd get a ML and be dropped after 10 minutes. We didn't uphold the GL at 0 though. If a player didn't have a decklist they'd receive a GL and have to submit one now. If a player's decklist was wrong, same thing, GL, fix it then move forward. I had one player who had submitted a decklist in Japanese, it was a problem every round, and every round I was told every round that it would be fixed for next round, and then next round lo and behold, it wasn't fixed. Finally I just translated it through google translator which resulted in some weird card names - Mysterious Controversy (Mystical Dispute) and Betrayal Agent (Agent of Treachery) being two of the biggest head-scratchers.

MagicFests, But Now With Technology!
Players not dropping properly was a bit of an issue, to drop or enter a result the players would type either !drop myArenaID#12345 or !result into the results channel. Which would be automatically transcribed onto a spreadsheet from which the scorekeeper would enter it into WLTR. Are you keeping track of how many channels there are? So far there's a results channel, a general channel for the event, an announcements channel and a help channel. Oh, and all the staff are in a voice channel. There was a lot of jumping between channels just to ensure no players were desperately looking for help and not receiving it. Time in the round was fairly standard, we'd poke each player and see if their result had been entered. Most of the time it had but someone had typed something wrong (results instead of result, or had put it in the event chat instead of results) and we as admin could just manually add it to the spreadsheet. We'd let the players know when time in the round was and to proceed with five turns. Somehow this wasn't a problem, players seemed to be able to figure out turns (or they just ignored us and finished their match, who knows). Also, most players finished within time, I guess Arena's timer was working well? The next thing to deal with was disconnecting. Players can try to reconnect but if that doesn't work the game will just time them out and they'll miss a few turns. A couple times players couldn't reconnect for whatever reason, to fix this they'd concede the game they DC'd in. for example, I win game one but DC in game two. We reconnect, set up the match and you concede the first game, then I concede the second game and we move to game three. Conceding games was also how we dealt with game losses for decklist problems.

...In Conclusion
Definitely glad I worked it. I was very much sweating bullets beforehand, as I'm not good with social tools and haven't really used Discord before, however I picked it up fairly quickly and got into the swing of things before long, resulting in a pretty fun but very packed day overall.