Welcome to Elo 2.0! We haven’t finished putting all the polish on the site yet, but we’ve gotten it to the point where we can show off what we’ve been working on. In the framework of last November’s post where I broke the project up into four main sections, I’ll be talking about the user-facing features we’ve added, plus some insight into what’s left to be done. Nearly all the functionality of Elo 1.0 is present on the site now, so while there will likely be hiccups, we’re hopeful that you’ll permit us a little more time to finish the rollout of other new things we’ve wanted to add.

1. Obviously the most important part of the update is that hundreds of new tournaments are on the site. So, my big boldface ask is that you check over your match history for any mistakes, check the history of your friends, ask the guy you play with at FNM who you saw wandering a GP hall if they’re on here. I have done a lot of curating work, but have done approximately zero looking at individual players’ pages to check for things like 0-1 drops that could be no-shows, or an event from 2002 being added on the back of someone’s history that should be a different person, etc.

2. While I’m talking about data, let me address an elephant in the room: after an update in March or April, melee.gg now does not show players’ names by default. You used to be able to mouseover someone’s screen name and see their actual name; the team confirmed to me that this was a bug and has been patched. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that people have to opt in to having their name displayed, so please don’t misinterpret my tone here: I’m not mad, just reporting the current state of the landscape.

   For Regional Championships and Pro Tours, the final standings that appear on magic.gg include the names of everyone who participated. I’m hopeful this will continue, and that means RCs and PTs are curated to the best of my ability. But for other recent events---think MagicCon Opens/PTQs, MXPs, LMS GOQs, etc.---I only have screen names for 20-30% of the field. If these people had played in a pre-2020 event that’s in our database, I have no way to link the current screen name to the old history. So in this way new data is degraded somewhat. Melee usernames are in the database as lastname only, so if you’re looking for oxJaceLover69xo, put that in the lastname box and skip firstname.

   If someone is new to the database and only has a username, for Elo purposes there’s no real harm in that; they’d be a new entry in the system regardless. Also note that if you’re now username-only on Melee but you played in an event before they patched the bug, then I was able to figure out your identity by looking through your Melee history. I decided my stance on this is “sorry, not sorry” since you can always asked to be anonymized from our site if you don’t want your name appearing here. In general if you want to throw me a bone while curating and don’t mind your name being on Melee then making your name visible there is a big help.

3. Each event in the database was assigned to a tournament series and each match was tagged with its format. This allowed us to add filters in a variety of places---if a player has appeared in five or more events, then their history includes a filter tournaments button which brings up a filtering widget:

Check or uncheck whatever you care about to limit the displayed events. The “pro” or “scg” buttons will check preselected combinations of boxes; when the Spotlight Series starts in January I’ll add a “gp-like” button that checks Grand Prix, MC Opens, and Spotlights. If you have other combinations you use frequently, let me know and I’ll consider adding them. You can see we also built in a feature request here that we’ve gotten a couple of times, the ability to reverse the chronology so that the oldest events are first and the matches read down the page in time order.

4. Tournament/format filtering was also added to the player card that appears on every player’s page who has appeared in five or more events.

Slightly confusingly, the blue fields aren’t links, but rather an indication where there are mouseover tooltips. I’m actively looking for more places to put tooltips around the site, so if there’s something that’s confusing, let us know and that’ll be a candidate for a future one. The “day 2s” column only takes into account events with a cut, so there could be discrepancies between the total number of events in that column versus the total in the event column. If you want to see the bottom line for various filtering choices, the summary tab gives you record and win percentage for all the major categories.

5. We upgraded the leaders page to incorporate the old “win percentage by format” stats page, which has consequently been retired (all of its features are integrated elsewhere!). There’s three flavors of leaders: Elo leaders (whereupon you can see the current highest rated players, the active highest rated players, and the highest peaks), tournament series leaders (which allows sorting by total wins or win percentage, and will soon allow for a custom mix of series if you care your own bespoke basket), and format leaders (which also allows sorting by total wins or win percentage). I’d expect we’ll add more features here as time goes on but there does come a point at which splitting hairs too finely doesn’t necessarily lead to better results.

6. Some of the stats pages were augmented to allow for Elo 1.0 compatibility; for example the unofficial world championship page has a toggle to only include PTs+GPs in case you were on that page previously and didn’t take a screenshot of it. Some of the other stats pages have had minor upgrades and amendments; a few pages from Elo 1.0 were considered low priority and are missing, but will be restored soon.

7. As far as continuity is concerned, unfortunately we had to make the decision to break a lot of old links, but we finally had the opportunity to switch away from a structure where every page was a .php file in one laundry basket directory and we seized it. Since we needed to give every person a new player ID anyway, there wasn’t much that we could save. It always irked me that the old site had /blog.php in place of /blog anyway.

Let’s talk about what isn’t done and is still on the way.

8. There are two intended site sections that don’t exist that we’ll work on adding over the next couple weeks. First, an events hub where you can see the list of every event on the site, filtered either by year or tournament series or both. Every event heading on players’ profiles links to surviving primary sources where possible, but it’s definitely possible now for someone to come to the site with the intention of looking up the Pro Tour Rivals of Ixalan original coverage page and that’s not something that’s directly accessible. We’ll make a direct path to what we have cataloged. For those tournaments whose data didn’t survive, we want to make a coverage archive wherein we’ll rebuild and host static versions of their pairings/results/standings pages. One of the guiding principles of the site is that we only want to use data that exists on the internet elsewhere already, so restoring a “primary source” for these events is important to us.

9. There are tournaments here and there that I’d like to add that are missing---Arena Championships come to mind, but there’s a few others. (One of the FAQ items is about this.) I’m aware that there’s more people want to see on the site, and thankfully it will be easier to add stuff into the middle of the timeline than it used to be.

I think that’s it for today! Like I said, we’ll be back to point out specific new additions in future blog updates. Today’s update was not meant to be the end of the development process, just one of the big milestones along the way. Thank you all for your patience, and extra thanks to our patrons for their continued support!