Today, we meet with an organizer that discovered the platform quite recently, but quickly saw its potential and took to himself to get the most out of it. He organizes on a game that you may not be really familiar with, but that boasts a really motivated and loyal community. Time to let him talk!
To start, please introduce yourself and your project
My name is Tobias, I’m 38 years old and I run the YouTube channel Game kNight Plays. I also frequently stream on Twitch.
Back in November 2015, when I started YouTube, it was based on a single game; Mordheim: City of the Damned. At the time, I didn’t see myself running a tournament or even playing that much PvP, but after just a couple of months myself and five other YouTubers got together to form the Mordheim YouTube League. But the game itself didn’t support it, so I had to get creative.
I created an excel document with several sheets, one for the rules, one for the YouTubers to register results in and another one to display the results in videos.
It was a huge success for my channel, but also for my experience with creating a tournament from the ground up – so it is something I look back at with joy, despite all the manual work.
Even before the end of the YouTuber tournament, several people were asking if they could join in – and it got me thinking about making a fully public tournament, for more people – but the thought of manually administering a larger tournament scared me!
I kept working on my system and rules – for a game that is not really designed for PvP progression tournaments – but when Toornament announced that Mordheim was available, I announced the beginning of the Buddyhood Brawl League (BBL).
We have steadily grown from 6 to 24 participants, and are now in the middle of the Third Edition of the BBL, with the BBL4 already in preparation for no less than 32 players, which will make it the largest progression tournament in Mordheim COTD history!
How did you discover Toornament?
A Tweet from the game developer which game I had been covering for 2 years – “Mordheim: COTD is now on Toornament!” – and of course I had to be among the first ones to create a tournament on the platform.
Toornament lets me arrange the structure of the tournament, which I spent way too many hours on manually doing in my previous excel sheets. It creates a transparency of whom you’ll fight next and what the results are without any hassle. It is truly the main reason that the BBL exists to this day, and the main reason why we have been able to expand from just 6 players to now soon 32.
What feature(s) do you like the most on Toornament?
I love the flexibility of Toornament and easy to use interface. People can report their own matches seamlessly in an environment that is visually nice to behold and it is easy for me, as a tournament creator, to follow the progression. Toornament allows for complex tournament setups like for my progression based league in Mordheim: COTD.
Anything you want to add?
I would like to thank my community, the kNightly Buddyhood, for sticking with me and going with my crazy ideas and supporting me in creating the best possible tournament system for Mordheim: COTD – Especially Wfenrir, my community manager and friend. His work and sparring on the BBL rules set has been invaluable to me. Also a shout-out to my wonderful moderators BTWRant, Rarator and Begbras – without all of you guys our community wouldn’t exist today!
Of course a huge thanks goes out to Rogue Factor for making the wonderful game that has captivated me and many others – one day, maybe one day, we will see a Mordheim 2, which could implement some of the work we have done today, into the game!
The eSports scene is growing, and I do honestly think there is a place for games like Mordheim somewhere in there – but in the end it depends a lot on the game itself – thanks to Toornament I have a chance to show the developers that it can be done. I wish to grow the Mordheim Community even further and my ambition is to have a US league and a EU league in the future, that can run yearly.
We want to thank Tobias for his time answering our questions, and we will of course be here to help the BBL keep growing!