4 posts tagged with "Product"

Our last post was nine days ago, on September 17th, and it ended by saying the rebuilt iOS app was not something you could install yet. It is now, on iPhone and iPad, and the new Android app went out the same day.

The rest of this post covers a tournament format FairGame did not have before, the Swiss pool, which you can draw in advance or round by round as results come in; a match clock the whole hall plays to; and a setting that stops a 12–0 from being published as 12–0. A good share of the work in between is invisible, mostly release tooling for the apps, error reporting and making the admin app hold up at 512 teams, and we have left it out.

Our last post was two weeks ago, on September 4th. Most of what shipped since went into two things you cannot see: a native iOS app we are rebuilding from scratch and have not put in anyone's hands yet, and a long pass over error reporting so we hear about failures before you tell us about them.

What did change for organizers came mostly from one place. A club ran a real tournament on FairGame, wrote down everything that got in their way, and sent us the list. Working through it turned out to be the most useful fortnight we have had in a while, because none of it was invented by us.

Our last post here was three weeks ago, on August 13th. Three weeks is not long, but FairGame looks different now: the tournament assistant we had been building quietly is ready to use, and a handful of other changes shipped alongside it.

Most of what changed under the hood is fixes and polish you would never notice. This post is about the parts that change what you can actually do: an assistant that acts on your tournament when you ask it to, a knockout bracket rebuilt from scratch, referees who cover for each other without you assigning a single shift, and a registration model that finally separates who signs up from who pays.

We spend most of our time with organizers during the parts of a tournament that hurt: the week before, when the schedule still doesn't fit, and the morning of, when a referee doesn't show. Almost everything that shipped this summer came out of watching those two moments.

Here is what is new — what each feature does, and the specific problem it removes.