Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne looks at the further softening in Disney Lorcana, Melee software and the Spooky Season.

The store hosted a Disney Lorcana Shimmering Skies Store Championship this afternoon, and the turnout provided yet more evidence that the once hot game is cooling off dramatically.  For our first Store Championship, we had people driving two to three hours to get here and easily an hour for our second one, but this event struggled to fill the required eight seats.  All the players were locals that played in our regular weekly league which was certainly good, but not even all of them showed up to play, meaning we had to readjust the Melee tournament software to account for fewer numbers than expected.  We managed to do it, but we have found that Melee’s tournament software does not make anything easy.

We find Melee really difficult to use, much harder than it should be.  It seems as if whoever designed it received specifics on what would make good tournament software, but did not bother to either look at previously existing software or read complaints and comments about other tournament software programs.

Melee reminds me of the course management software Southeast Missouri State University uses, Canvas.  It is incredibly comprehensive, covering every contingency a user might have to consider and asking the user to set them all up when designing the course, so that you have every contingency that might come up taken into consideration.  Unfortunately, 90% of the courses constructed don't need that level of complexity.  They need the options necessary to create a basic course, and then the ability to tweak it and add levels of complexity to the course depending on what is necessary to design the course to meet the instructor and student needs for the class.

This is the problem Melee has.  It appears a very detailed piece of tournament software that is designed to offer an option for any situation that someone creating a tournament might need.  However, most tournaments, especially casual ones, do not need that level of complexity. What most tournament organizers really need is software that asks a few questions such as: what game, how many players, how many rounds and if there is a cut to top number of players.  Then the software would create the tournament based on those parameters, and if the organizer wants to add more detail or tweak settings, there is an option for that. Simplicity is generally better than complexity.

The Spooky Season is upon us (see "Horror Week 2024").  As I noted in the column, we have not seen any increase in sales of horror themed games or books, though people have started to show up for our Scary Stories with Syd and Haunted Carbondale Walking Tours.  Halloween is the second largest retail holiday in terms of consumer spending, hitting around $13 billion this year. However, that is a far cry from the over $700 billion generated by consumer spending during the Christmas season.  Also, as I noted in the column, since most of the spending for the holiday revolves around candy, costumes and creepy house decorations, I do not expect to see much of a sales boost directly attributable to Halloween, but since displaying horror themed graphic novels and games does not take much effort, we will put them on display and be happy for any additional sales.

Comments?  Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.