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A simple, yet quite unknown feature on Toornament is the fact that you can Export the list of your participants or registrations directly from the platform, with a simple click. This will generate a CSV file, and is useful if you need to gather all your participants’ data at once!
If you do not have seen it yet, we highly recommend you take a good look and read at the Event Production showcase we did with the ESWC Summer. We have met with Sylvain Maillard to discuss his new toolbox and the whole process.
Hello Toornament.com! I work with the ESWC staff since 2006, first as tournament manager and for a short while as content manager. Created in 2003, the ESWC is one of the oldest esports competitions. Today a convention-type event, the ESWC consists of several events a year, where we manage or host video games competitions, notably for publishers. Recently, Winter and Summer events in France featured, among others, international tournaments of Call of Duty, Clash Royale, Street Fighter V or League of Legends.
My work is to organize tournaments during the events, define their formats and schedule, and make sure the communication around the event is good, especially with our gamers’ communities through our numerous supports (website, social networks etc.). I also assist technical teams on content creation to display on live streams.
One of 2017 goals for the ESWC was to improve the spectators’ experience and the tournaments information we could offer both on our website and the live streams. Indeed, fans are more and more eager for data about the participants of the tournaments, with personal information and their previous performances, or detailed statistics. We had to offer this content on tournaments with lots of participants and results, and it had to remain possible for the teams to manage it during a live event.
We were already using Toornament.com to handle participants registrations and the results reporting. But the additional data we then displayed on our streams were created with imported data from Toornament.com or hand-gathered and compiled within sheets that were then read by our streaming tools. This didn’t allow good reaction times during a live event and was a lot of extra work to update the visual assets. We were looking for a solution to have a unique and automatized source to display on all supports.
The API from Toornament.com has been the cornerstone of our new display system, both for the ESWC website and the visual assets of the live streams. With calls to the API, data to be displayed are automatically gathered with PHP Scripts that autonomously build a webpage ready to be shown on stream. We also created a small web interface that would have all of the available assets for all parts of the competition, available with a single click.
This system notably allows the video productor and his assistants not to bother with updating the visual assets to be displayed on screen. All they have to do is select the needed page, depending on what information about the tournament they need to display.
The main challenge was to create and prepare all those assets beforehand. For the Clash Royale tournament for example, added to the participants and matches displays, no less than 4 assets were necessary for the Final Bracket, depending on what you wanted to display (Full Bracket, Winner Bracket, Loser Bracket and Top-8). This was made with HTML/PHP and had to be ready long before the event, with details tailored for each tournament and discipline.
The ESWC Summer has been a great feedback on the experience of this new system. We still have work to do, on the assets list interface for example, to further improve our efficiency during the events.
We also need to work on the automatization of bracket displays for a tournament. Optimisation of the visual assets on the webpages is also a wide subject, as they sometimes heavily drew on our Stream PC’s resources.
For the Version.2 of the Live Mod of the ESWC website, we need to be able to display the results in a structured view, for groups and brackets both, and not just a list of matches. This will ensure a better understanding of the progress of the tournament for the spectators.
We expect the Toornament.com API to allow us to fetch the detailed game-related statistics it gathers from the official game’s API, like in League of Legends or DOTA2 for example.
Also, the more information about the tournaments are available through the API (both to read and write), the better for us, as it will enable a wide range of tools and displays about the tournament and its participants!
We would like to thank Sylvain for his time, to showcase and present his tools, and answer our questions.
As for the last one, detailed statistics have been disabled on Toornament since the release of the new version, but they are bound to come back really soon, and all these data will be available through our API, just like the rest, so expect an even better experience for the next ESWC event!
Since its lastest edition of February in Paris, and before the next Paris Games Week, ESWC will hold its Summer Edition, organized for the first time in Bordeaux, France, on Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd of July, 2017.
For this special occasion, a lot of things are bound to happen in the 1500m² of the Bordeaux Palais des Congrès. Tournaments, animations, live streams and the likes of it will rhythm the week-end.
See below for the tournaments that will be played during the ESWC Summer:
For the third event in a row the ESWC will host a Clash Royale tournament during the ESWC Summer 2017 from 1st to 2nd July at Bordeaux. This new challenge will gather 32 finalists for a cash prize of 5,000€ split between the top four players. However, to be part of the event players will have to fight their way through qualifiers or to be directly selected.
After having invested in esports last February, FDJ first ever international competition is about to come to an end during the ESWC Summer, with the Finals of the FDJ Masters League on Street Fighter V. 32 european players participated in the qualifiers, and it’s down to 4 finalists for the conclusion on the Main Stage with a $20.000 cash prize to grab!
Invocators, it’s time to bring your troops together for the ESWC Summer Cup with OMEN by HP tournament on League of Legends at Bordeaux. Open to 32 French teams the LAN is aimed at both amateur, streamer and pro teams.
Other notable events contain but do not limit to:
A new streaming service is now supported by Toornament: Mixer.
Mixer is a Microsoft next-gen streaming service that offers viewers real-time influence and participation in live game streams.
Real-time and interactivity are the cornerstones of this new service, and you can start broadcasting from XBox One or Windows 10 in a few clicks, without having to install any extra software.
When selecting the streams for your tournament, you can now add a Mixer URL and attach the stream to the matches of your tournament. That will display the stream directly on the Public and Match pages for spectators to see.
The process is detailed HERE.
Last week-end was played the first ever Western Unified Tournament in Vainglory, with teams from both Europe and North America competing for the honor of being the first champion, and their fair share of the $60.000 Cash Prize.
In case you missed it, all the results can be found on Toornament:
We’ve been working hand in hand with Super Evil Megacorp from the get go, in their attempt at making their game a huge esports title, and it’s time to take a look back at the long way already made, and what’s still to do.
Hello! My name is Heini Vesander, and I am the Executive Producer for esports at Super Evil Megacorp. Super Evil is a game studio based in San Mateo, California. We build soulful, beautiful core gaming experiences for the next generation of gamers on touch screens.
Heini: “Sure thing! Vainglory is a MOBA for mobile, and the world’s #1 mobile esport. We launched the game in July 2015, after an early release phase, and we’re excited about how enthusiastic our community is! Vainglory is a full-on MOBA for iOS and Android. Players play on a team of 3 against another team of 3 and the goal is to destroy the Vain crystal in the opponent’s home base. The game is about outplaying your opponents real-time using powerful heroes and perfecting team coordination. The game is free to play and download – and there’s no timers or energy mechanics. So players can play as much as they want.”
Heini: “Vainglory was built with the aim to build a deep, meaningful player experience on mobile. A game that’s community-driven and fun to play with friends. We built Vainglory ground up for mobile, without trying to casualize the MOBA genre – nor make a direct port from another platform. In doing so, we built a game that is competitive and fun to watch. We dreamt that the game would become an esport, but honestly, the community surprised us by organizing competitive tournaments way before we even said “esports”. Based on feedback from the community, we added a spectator mode and later a built a spectator client that runs on a mac to empower esports.”
The Western Unified Championship stage, in London – ©ESL UK
“And so, we believe in the potential of mobile esports. Especially if you look at the numbers – 700 million PCs out there, and 3 billion smartphones. Some day soon, mobile esports will become big. Weather the leading title will be Vainglory or something else remains to be seen. We’re super excited about the growth of our competitive scene, and we’ve welcomed amazing teams like Fnatic, Cloud9, Echo Fox, TSM and G2 esport. We’ve also seen homegrown teams like Hammers and Gansktars succeed. It’s still early days for mobile esports and we’re very excited about the near future.”
The Western Unified Championship Trophy, lifted by the winners, 
Cloud9 – ©ESL UK
Heini: “The very first Vainglory community tournaments were run by VGL (vaingloryleague.com), and they were using the Toornament platform. It proved to work really well. What we really like is how easy the tournament brackets are to share on social media and especially on websites. VGL inspired us to use Toornament for our Vainglory8 broadcasts!”
Heini: “What’s really great with Toornament is how easy it is to organize and handle big tournaments. It’s also very easy to share access to the many people involved. The platform’s simple design works both for desktop and mobile, and the app is an easy way for teams to follow the status of the tournament.”
Heini: “Our first wish is a feature that allows us to schedule multiple matches and series to specific dates and times. Currently, each match needs to be reported manually, which makes the process complicated and slow when the brackets are big. Our second wish is an improved way for teams to report their scores and screenshots of end-of-match.”
We’d like to thank Super Evil Megacorp for their trust in our platform, and especially Heini Vesander for having taken the time to answer our questions. As for his wishes, one has already been almost fulfilled, with our Scheduling Tool that allows organizers to batch edit their match schedules on a single page, and many more things possible thanks to our API.
We will keep improving the experience of our users, organizers and participants alike, and we take into account and study every feedback that’s made to us!
