Here’s the tl;dr of this post: We have a Patreon now! Yay! If that’s all we needed to say to hook you, here’s the link to the Patreon. If you’d like to know more about our thought process and our goals for the site going forward, read on.

For a little while the Elo project has sat at a crossroads. Ever since the pandemic, the site has been in long-term maintenence mode: we can add new tournaments to the site using our existing infrastructure, but that’s about it. We haven’t added features or improved the infrastructure since 2019. (Nor have we even kept up with the features that already are here; there was a year-long period where the graphs didn’t work, for example.)

There are a bunch of reasons for this. We made the site originally using skills we had acquired in 2007-2010, and we weren’t web developers by trade at the time. Making the site was the perfect challenge for us—it was right on the cusp of our abilities, and we leveled up in all sorts of different areas as we first brought the project online. We’ve learned a lot since then, but most of the processes underlying the site were written in 2016 (and so on some level they’re stuck in 2010).

The initial concept of the project involved solely looking at GPs—the site was originally going to be grandprixelo.net. It seems obvious in retrospect that PT data should be here as well, but it wasn’t clear to me at the time the extent to which the function of the site was going to be as a historical archive of events. Now we view the ratings as a fun little extra hook and the fact that you can go look up who LSV played in his 16-0 run at PT San Diego 2010 is the main point. On the other hand, many of these early choices leaked into the way the site was built, and it’s not really possible to fix them without overhauling everything. We sat down yesterday to think of features we wished were on the site or ways in which our backend was organized differently and effortlessly came up with a list of twenty things.

One of the most common questions we get is “do you have plans to include X”? Usually X is SCG Opens or Invitationals, or the NRG series, or Legacy EU tournaments, or MOCS, or Nationals, etc. Initially we tried to stem the tide on these questions by saying that we only were going to include events at the same “tier” of the organized play system, but with the phasing out of GPs, this makes less and less sense. How are the four-slot PTQs that were run at MagicCon Philadelphia at a different tier than the Regional Championships? And in that case, why were SCG Invitationals that awarded a PT slot to the champion different from GPs? If the point of the site is to be a clearinghouse for all the results that are (or once were) on the internet, we really should try to collect everything that’s ever been out there.

The issue is that adding these events, and clearing the other 19 things off our feature list, will take a lot of time and effort, and we no longer have our PhD theses to procrastinate from to make all of that effort feel justified without compensation. We both feel strongly that it’s important for the site to be free and public, as we’re just reflecting data that already exists in other places. (Uh, except the 2020 CFB GPs, we’re the only source for them now.) And the site will always remain free and unpaywalled. But we need your help to be able to take the project to the next level: modernizing the site infrastructure, adding historical tournaments, improving the mobile interface, adding a public API to make our data more accessible, updating the ratings formula, adding new data visualization tools, and so on and so on. If you’ve gotten anything out of this project over the past seven years and you can spare a few dollars a month, you now have the opportunity to support the project via our brand new Patreon. In return you’ll get access to some how-the-sausage-is-made posts, the chance to submit mailbag stats questions, and of course (most importantly!) you will help us take the site into the future and keep making it the best it can be. <3