Wow, 2020 right? What a year that turned out to be. Howdy! Paul here with Best Coast Pairings.
Last year was a roller coaster for everyone and that can make it really easy to overlook some of the incredible things that did happen along the way. I wanted to take a few minutes to share with you the BCP 2020 year in review, talk with you about the amazing things that happened with BCP in 2020 and give you something to look forward to in 2021!
Well before Corona became more than just a beer for most of us, the Best Coast Pairings and Down Under Pairings teams were preparing for the most epic team up since peanut butter and jelly. Combining our teams was the “perfect pairing” and allowed us to accelerate a lot of our design and infrastructure pipeline. Of particular concern to everyone (especially the DUP team Josh and Adam) was critical functionality and stability. After an extensive rework and rigorous testing, the BCP system now uses 1/100th of the data previously used for each action. This makes for a much smoother, scalable and stable system for the entire platform.
It has been difficult to get together for events this past year but that has not stopped gamers from gaming wherever and whenever they can. Even with a global pandemic, the BCP system saw 5205 events, 72,828 players and over 269,924 games in the last calendar year. We identified early on the need to support online game systems, remote play, and leagues so we made changes to adjust. We disabled Location-Based Check-In and we rolled out new “Pinless Scoring” allowing players to record results for their game as long as they are logged in to their BCP account. This works perfectly with our “Scorecard” system which provides a new level of detail in mass to your games never seen before. When Scorecards are enabled, TOs are able to assign a scorecard to the event records which shows in real time the active scores and results at a table. This shows, in detail, the selected missions and how they are being scored in real time. Additionally, we updated our ticketing system to support over 130 different currencies around the world, making it easy for event organizers to sell tickets to events and for players to register. We even added in support for several new game systems such as Catan, MTG Commander/EDH, Crisis Protocol, Digimon Card Game, and Zenozard.
Have you been to the BCP website lately? If not you should! Our fresh redesign is full of new tools where you can login to locate, score, and track your games. The functionality of the player app has been expanded to the web allowing virtually anyone with a smartphone to use our tools for events (that includes all 5 of you with Blackberries). While we were at it we added two nifty new features: “Stats Circuits” and “My Games”. “My Games” expands on the Scorecard system and enables users to create and track games not in an event. Now you can really track how many times you have beat those in your bubble. “Stats Circuits” is a new subscriber feature that gives a detailed breakdown of how players, factions and more perform in games used on the BCP system. Astartes are OP and we can prove it!
Lastly, we have completely overhauled our Event Suite and Circuit tools to make them more robust, accessible and user friendly. Creating events and requesting tokens is easier than ever with our new event request tool. Your event can be created while requesting tokens for multiple leagues and circuits, all done via our handy dandy embeddable plugin. League and Circuit admins have access via the web to create and modify circuits and approve tokens. While not available for everyone just yet, basic Event Suite functionality will be available to all BCP subscribers before the end of the first quarter, along with a whole host of new streaming tools.
Looking back, 2020 was a long 5 years, and we have missed all of you. We look forward to getting together with you at the next big event when it is safe to do so and rolling some dice, flipping some cards and, well, gaming! Keep an eye out for some big announcements we have coming soon about some major publishers we are working with for 2021, it is going to be a game changing year. Thank you to the Gaming Community, Event Organizers and Players, we could not do it without you! The BCP team wishes you the best for a safe, fun and prosperous 2021 and beyond! See you soon!