A Look Into the Future (Events)
A peek at where KeyChain is heading in the future, providing opportunities for your playgroup to promote upcoming events.
As part of KeyChain’s one year anniversary, we’re especially excited to share what we have lined up next for the site.
Our goal has always been to support and reward organized play. In our first year, this has primarily been on the “post-event” side of things. Event organizers would promote their event somewhere else and conduct their tournament somewhere else (such as with tournament bracket software, including Sloppy Labwork’s own Sloppy Tournaments).
Once that event concluded, that’s when KeyChain entered the picture. EOs would create the event on KeyChain, and would input the results. Players would then be able to view the event’s results, and earn progression and awards from it.
What we’d like to address now, is our effort to now try to bring KeyChain to the “pre-event” side of things too.
Creating Upcoming Events
Upcoming events in KeyChain are quite similar to completed events, in that they undergo the same process to be created. The only difference is that you would set the date to a date in the future, and you would leave the Player Count at its default of 0 players.
What EOs are able to do now, is tick a new box titled Accept Registrations. When this toggle is set, it allows players to self-register for an event using a nice shiny REGISTER button. This can help give EOs a heads-up as to how many players they expect to have in their tournament.
EOs can share their event link on KeyChain however they like, which will allow any players with a KeyChain account to register. Plus, a new Description field lets EOs put in any pertinent information for prospective attendees, such as info about the timing, structure, format, pricing, and more.
Playgroup members can see the list of users who have registered in the event, whereas non-members will only see a tally of how many other players have registered for the event.
Launch Into Sloppy Tournaments
Many playgroup EOs may already be familiar with Sloppy Tournaments' tight integration with KeyChain, and how after completing an event in Sloppy Tournaments, you can export directly to an event on KeyChain.
Also starting today, EOs will now be able to take an upcoming event in KeyChain and kick-off a tournament in Sloppy Tournaments using the [Start A Tournament] button once they are ready to start. This will prepare a tournament with all of the registered players. EOs will still be able to add/remove players. as well as adjust tournament settings. in Sloppy Tournaments after the export. (After clicking [Start A Tournament], any changes to players should be made in the tournament bracket in Sloppy Tournaments rather than in the KeyChain event.)
After the tournament is completed, the tournament creator will be able to export the tournament results back to its associated KeyChain event, making the entire roundtrip process seamless.
On a related note, any events in KeyChain which have had results imported from Sloppy Tournaments will now show a link to “View Tournament” from within KeyChain, so players can easily navigate to the complete tournament bracket in Sloppy Tournaments.
Where We’re Heading
Our vision with posting upcoming events to KeyChain is to tap into KeyChain’s potential as a playgroup and event finder for the KeyForge community.
One way we intend to do this is through an interactive map of game stores, including one that can be filtered by stores who have upcoming events, as well as stores who have run events of previous formats in the past.
There are other ways too we intend to display upcoming events to players as well that also will be able to include playgroups without a physical location, such as upcoming events lists and/or calendars. We’ll have more information on that soon.
EOs of Game Store playgroups can start preparing for this feature by adding a venue with a physical address to their playgroup. EOs can click [Manage Playgroup] from their playgroup home page, and scroll down to Venues to add a venue.
We hope this suite of features is something both event organizers and event seekers will be excited about, making KeyChain a centralized destination for players to find groups and stores near them, as well as what events are upcoming.
Stay tuned tomorrow, for details on our small one year anniversary Charm Drop!