Introductory Scorekeeping - Lesson 4
Common Issues
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Hello there!
Welcome to the Cascade Games Scorekeeper Lessons. As always, I’m your host Jonah. Over the last couple of lessons, we’ve discussed all the basic steps to create and run a successful event. But some events are more eventful than others…
Here we’ll discuss the three most common issues and how to resolve them.
Inaccessible Account
First of all, let them know that they still can play: this is important so the round is not delayed. You or a judge can inform that player what their table is for that round or they can use paper pairings.
Reset Password
If they know what’s their e-mail but cannot login, instruct them to try to reset their password.
The reset link is valid for 24 hours, so they can finish this process after the round or even after the tournament.
New Account
If the player doesn’t have access to or doesn’t remember their e-mail, you can create a new account for them:
They’ll receive an e-mail which they can later use to claim that account.
Set up a Guest Account
If your player is younger than 13 years old or needs a temporary account, set them up with a Guest Account:
Contact Support
Finally, if your player has some other kind of problem to access their account, direct them to Melee’s Customer Support.
Erroneous Result Submitted
Say two players submitted their previous result wrong and now they need help. The good news is that this investigation is not up you - a judge will probably handle it. The better news is that Melee allows you to fix it quite simply:
Head to the Matches screen and select the Round with the wrong result. Locate the match with the error and change the result the same as if you were just inserting it. This will not change any current pairings, but future ones will take into consideration the fixed points. Ideally, you’re able to adjust results before pairing the next round.
An investigation should take place. If a player says that they have too many points, we can usually take them at their word and adjust appropriately. If a player says they have too few points, it’s important for a judge to find their opponent and confirm the correct match result.
Also keep in mind that some information or updates aren’t relevant to us - in a best-of-three, it doesn’t matter the order in which players won their games, but some players are concerned and will ask you to update it to match. We only track the total number of games won, not the order. Similarly, in single elimination events, players may sometimes let you know that they won 2-1 and not 2-0, but that doesn’t impact match points, and single elimination almost never uses tie breakers.
Late Players
Sometimes, for no fault of the player, they are missing from a round. On the other hand, it may be that they are late but really want to play. Not every software will allow you to do whatever your Head Judge would like - but Melee does.
Enroll the player, then in the Matches screen choose to ‘Edit Match-ups’. The recently added player will appear on the right-hand column of the overlay. The three actions next to it allow you to, respectively, give them a bye, a loss, or drop them from the event. Remember to save your changes.
That brings us to a close for today! While there are a ton of other issues that come up, these cover the vast majority of issues that will arise, and consequently are the most important for you to be comfortable with addressing.
While some features of the scorekeeping software will be obvious, there are a lot of tools that are available to you. Those are beyond the scope of these lessons, but we encourage you to come back when we launch our intermediate scorekeeping lessons or to just launch a test event and poke around inside to see what can happen.
In fact if you’re planning on delving into scorekeeping, I strongly encourage you to keep a test event around, so that you can experiment with it, and not damage an ongoing event. If an error occurs in an event that you’re scorekeeping and you’re not able to quickly resolve it, you may find some success in trying to replicate the error in your test event, and then experiment with finding resolutions.
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Until next time, good luck and have fun!