Category: Business

Will you be in Dallas (Quakecon) or Cologne (Gamescom) this week?

Two major events this week for video games enthusiasts, first the QuakeCon in Dallas, USA, and the Gamescom in Cologne, Germany.
Let’s see what those two events have in store for us!

This year will be the 21st edition of the historic event, and Quake Champions is going to be the guest of honor, with the Finals of the Quake World Championship ($1,000,000 tournaments!) being held during the convention.
Two game modes are present, Duel which pits players 1v1:

And Sacrifice, for team matches 4v4:

If all teams for the Sacrifice tournament are known from the NA and EU Regional Finals, Duel players from their respective NA and EU Regional Finals will be joined by the 8 best BYOC players, which will be qualified live from the convention. You can find all due information regarding the tournaments on the Official Competition Rules.

And you will notice that there’s more than just Quake Champions, there is also an Anniversary Quake II Duel Tournament, a Rage: Road Rage tournament and a Battle of the BYOC DOOM tournament!
This QuakeCon is going to be something to behold, and may be the revival of an epic esports title!

In the meantime in Cologne will be held the Gamescom, with a much diverse panel of exhibitors, from Bandai Namco (Dragon Ball FighterZ anyone?!) to Electronic Arts (who already announced Battlefront II and an esports mode for Battlefield 1), Konami (PES 2018) and Microsoft Studios (preparation for the Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds Invitational was racking up the viewers on Twitch before it even started!), without forgetting Amazon Game Studios (here for their title Breakaway, sort of a mash-up game between Battlerite and Rocket League).

But besides PUBG’s Invitational, this convention is not all about announcements and games to come, as several huge events are to happen there:

The Finals of the Hearthstone Global Games 2017:

Season 2 Finals of the Rainbow Six Siege Pro League Year 2:

Last but not least, the ESWC is also going to be on site with Clash Royale and FIFA 17 tournaments,
As for Clash Royale, two Offline Qualifiers will determine the last players that join the champions who already qualified through the Online Qualifiers since July, and the Round-Robin distribution of the champions is known already:

All details can be found on the ESWC Clash Page.

Finally, the FIFA tournament will be the ESWC GamePro Cup, a national competition where the best german players meet for the title and a 5,000€ Cash Prize:

With two great events taking place in opposite sides of the world, isn’t home still the best place to be, to be able to follow them both and not miss a thing?

UseCase: ESWC Summer 2017

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.

Please introduce yourself and the ESWC in a few words

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.

We have seen your amazing video production, what were the needs leading to the creation of these tools?

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.

What technology are you using? What challenges appeared and how did you tackle them?

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.

What is, for you, the next step in this project’s evolution?

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.

What new feature would you like to see added to Toornament?

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!

This week-end: ESWC Summer 2017

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:

New streaming provider: Mixer

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.