ToorAdmin, Author at Toornament Blog

New feature : Draft status

You look at your dashboard today and yes, something has changed. This orange box wasn’t there before. Half-Life 3 confirmed ? Nearly : We’ve changed the way you can handle your tournament status.

By default, your tournament is now marked as a “draft”. This means it is 100% operational and working, but cannot be found through search engines on Toornament site and mobile app. You can still share its unique URL to people, but that’s it.

Publishing your tournament will make it visible, searchable and sharable by everyone.

The draft status is very handy when you’re building your tournament and just need to manually share it with a few trusty people (admins, sponsors, players).

The Published status make your tournament 100% visible and sharable. It’s of course great for your audience, media partners and competitors.

We hope this UX update will make the process smoother for you. Feek free to send us feedback !

Introducing the schedule functionnality

Let’s start the week with a new feature on Toornament: Schedules!

This new tool allows you to create schedules with various purposes. Schedules can be set as public or private.

Here are some examples of public schedules:

Opening and closing hours
Extra activities (autograph signings, special events)
Main stage schedule

And some examples of private schedules:

Admins time of arrival on site
Match process (when to go get the players, set-up the machines etc.)
Admins meeting

To
create a schedule, just go to the “Schedule” in your dashboard. From
there, you can create and edit pretty much everything you need. The
public schedules will be visible in the tournament widget.

You can now start to test and use them, feel free to send us your feedbacks!

[Professionals] Video game studios : request our support for your game !

One of the main Toornament specifities is that it can adapt its features to each Esport discipline it supports.

Because each game works its way, esport wise. Street Fighter IV means 1v1, counter picks and different characters. Starcraft means maps and races, Counter-Strike and LoL a team based.

We help tournament organizers by adapting our fields and settings to their games. Toornament now supports more than 70 Esport disciplines, but we know their more on the way.

Of course, our platform perfeclty works with every game (or any sport), it just comes in “vanilla” flavor. When your start a tournament on a game non supported by Toornament, just have to pick the “generic discipline“ setting.

The other way is to simply contact us : we’d be happy to help and add your game to our supported discipline pool !

This is what recently happened with Lightbulb Crew’s Games of Glory. We’re going even further with some games APIs, such as DotA and soon, League Of Legends…

To contact us, just click on the blue “?” button on the lower right corner of your dashboard, or just tweet to us on twitter, toornament !

[Organizers] Get your customized Toornament page

Our platform is getting quite famous for its embeddable widget, so we wanted to give your even more sharing option. This one is like a standalone widget !

“Custom Page” comes in very handy when you don’t have a dedicated website, or your own website is down for a reason. Setting up a Custom Page is matter of seconds and will generate a webpage with an unique, persistant URL and some customization options.

In your dashboard, go to your the “Share” menu and select “Custom Page”. From here, you can choose :

– Which information your widget will display by default.
“Navigator” is like a homepage
“Information” will display the tournament basic infos
“Schedule” for the next matches to be played
“Participants” to get an exhaustive list of the competitors
“Bracket” to get right into the action

– The background color can be picked through a color picker or html color codes.

– A background image.
Our tip : as our widget is center aligned, you can design a fitting picture, to display a frame aournd and your sponsors below for example.

There, you have it : an independant, standalone webpage for your tournament !

[Organizers] Yes, you can (run your tournament from a smartphone)

Here’s a question we get on a regular basis : can my team and I run Toornament from mobile devices ?

Of course you can. And here are some tips to make the most of Toornament on the go :

As for now, our dedicated mobile app is a consumer product, meaning it’s designed to bring up scores, results, streams links and schedules for all of our users. It’s not meant (yet) to admin a tournament.

We picked this path simply because our website is 100% responsive and totally mobile compliant. Running it from any mobile device will be a breeze. We used for example a single iPhone to enter on site all the scores and infos of the Redbull Kumite !

Here are a few tips before you jump in :

– Make sure your wifi doesn’t block any connection port

– Double check every action you make on the site

– Set up your device so that it doesn’t go into sleep mode too fast, mobile browsers are sometimes a bit harsh on cookies and can log you out.

– Going all mobile on your team can be a great time saver, as long as you’re organised enough so that everyone take care of a very precise matter (match score, editing participants etc.)

– Don’t fear for your battery life and data usage, Toornament behave as as simple web service, so no hidden tasks, geotagging pings or constant notifications !

Whether you run online leagues or offline tournaments, using mobile devices offers great flexibility admin-wise. Feel free to try Toornament on your regular smartphones and tablets !