[Organizers] How to run larger than 256 participants tournaments

Toornament max participants number currently tops at 256 players.

The main reasons behind this choice are to prevent a huge, unreadable structure with a visual footprint spanning over several web pages high and wide. For example, here how looks a 128 player single elimination bracket :

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Check the full resolution here.

Finally down there? You just scrolled through HALF of a 256 players simple bracket! It already is massive, and we didn’t even pick a double elimination structure!
But if you run a large scale tournament, there are still way to build them on Toornament, with a quite simple method : divide into sub tournaments.

Each one acts as a branch of the main tournament.

Let’s take for example a 1024 players Street Fighter IV tournament. You can split it into four 256 players tournaments where the top 32 players are qualified. You can even run these pre bracket to their finals, to get seedings in the final bracket.

In your Toornament dashboard, just create 4 tournaments named “My huge Street Fighter IV Cup – Sub Tournament A”, all the way to the letter D.

The top 32 players from each 4 sub-tournaments will qualify and thus, build a final 128 players bracket.

Here how the method looks :

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This method is as straighforward as flexible, allowing you to handle huge tournaments and leagues with a better organisation. Of course, keep in mind that large tournaments are timing nightmares, so always keep in mind if you’ve checked all the boxes to handle them, from time to admins and gaming stations!

A Toornament case study : ESWC COD 2015

Last week end, the ESWC held its first COD exclusive tournament at Le Zénith Paris. This top tier event was a great opportunity for us to showcase all the tools and new features recently released on Toornament.

We first worked with ESWC tournament director Sylvain Maillard to set up the formats, structures, seedings and the permissions for his admin and referees teams. The pools were generated from the initial manual seeding and all matches were played from three spots : the two gaming stations and the main stage.

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The ESWC COD 2015 is the first event using our new Toornament TV (see all details here). A Toornament TV display was put in the heart of the gaming zone, helping everyone (admins, players, medias) passing by to get all the necessary informations in the glimpse of an eye.
Later, Toornament TV was also used on the streams, to provide with in-between matches contents.

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Our mobile app is now out for iOS and Android and was used by admins, players and a few in the know spectators. As expected, the mobile app will bring great informations in real time for everyone, everywhere. It worked so well during the event that we’re about to build a solid score ticker offer in the next few days, bringing all the major tournaments and games results on Toornament !

Download Toornament for iOS (free)

Download Toornament for Android (free)

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All in all, we’re very happy with the way Toornament handled all the needs from ESWC. Our goal is to provide an exhaustive array of features, all tightly packed in a smooth experience, whatever the screen it’s used on.

At the time of writing, our team is now at Dreamhack France, another great Esport event using Toornament !

Here’s the new Toornament TV

Our public display and in-between match content solution has been updated !
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This new version embeds a live info strip, based on a Twitter feed and hashtag. Toornament TV is also customisable through its main elements :

  • Background picture
  • Main layout picture
  • Border color (CSS)
  • Text color

You can check it Live on this page.

The ESWC CoD 2015 starting this week end will be the first tournament to use the new Toornament TV.
Toornament TV is still underwork and thus, not directly available from your dashboard. If you’re interested, feel free to contact us !

Why you should add new games to your Esport event

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The incoming Nintendo shooter, “Splatoon”, is designed with competition in mind.

We all know Esport is nowadays driven by a few chosen games : League Of Legends, DotA, Counter Strike, Hearthstone, Call of Duty, Street Fighter and such. Those major disciplines are followed by a pack of underdogs : Smite, Super Smash Bros, EA Sports games, World of Tanks etc.

But their numerous Esport compliant games with a little, but active community. We recently saw a huge “Arma 3” match and Nintendo is driving it’s newest IP “Splatoon” as a friendly, but highly competitive shooter.

As a tournament organizer, should focus your ressources on popular and known games, or give their chance to new  one ?

We support the later, for 5 reasons :

1. Easier to get to the community and publisher

Getting support from a game community or publisher may be a hard task, as everyone are close to harrass them for some attention, support or money. New or minor but promising games are on the other begging for attention and events. Getting to them will then a much easier process.

2. Money

Working on a new game can also bring great opportunities, as the game publisher will have some budget to spend on adds (media) and special operations (you). Bring a well thought pitch deck and your “new game” tournament won’t take ressources aways from your “main games” tournaments. It may even earn you some money.

3. Variety
If your tournament boasts several games, it’s always a good thing throw heavy contenders and rookie in the mix. Variety is an underrated value in Esport tournaments and Olympics are a great example of how major and minor disciplines benefit each other – and ultimately, benefit the event awareness.

4. Room for innovation
Well established games often rhymes with conservative tournaments. Groupstages to simple/double elimination playoffs are the staple in Esport tournaments, with few alternative structures. Some games like Heartstone, have their own format but again (i.e “Conquest”), but it’s still hard to chose another path. Fresh games are the perfect playground for fresh tournament structures and scoring system. Grab the opportunity !

5. “Small risk / hi reward” bet
Trying to support a new game may be seen as a risk and in a way, it is. It’s up to you to limit that risky part of the bet. Don’t invest in money prize (or let the publisher / sponsor take care of this), invite a limited amount of participants and try to squeeze the logistics requirement into manageable volume by your admin team.

As Toornament already support more than 70 Esport disciplines, we hope you’ll request us to support more !