Category: Tutorial

[Organizers] Your tournament’s information: what, when, where?

We’ve previously talked about the importance to fill all the important informations of your tournament. This topic is still underestimated, as we, as media and eSports fans, still struggle too often to get infos on major tournaments. This shouldn’t happen anymore.

So, let’s see today which information you should push and more importantly, when and where.

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What?

Be sure you’ll have to answer these questions several times. Better have them displayed.

General

  • Schedules
  • Dates and location
  • Streams, results

Participants

Audience

  • Entry fee
  • Animations

These are the critical informations you need to deliver. The next points are “When ?” and “Where ?”

When?

Well, asap of course. Don’t wait the last moment to publish all your informations. Participants, audience, medias and partners need to organize themselves too. Just add information as soon as you have them confirmed.

This last part is important, as people won’t read some of your informations twice and later correcting a false information may be too late. Make sure you have them double-validated and tripple-locked before pushing them into the public.

Where?

The best way is to centralise all your information in one location, generally your official website. Social networks are not suited to display important informations, as they mostly function as a flow. A pinned tweet or link in bio won’t cut it.

Now that you made sure all the informations are available soon enough and accessible enough, you can spread them in famous sites and platform (do you know Toornament?) in case your primary base is down for some reason.

[Organizers] One Rulebook to rule them all

Running a tournament means running into issues. Most of the ones related to rules are covered by a ruleset. But is that enough?

We’ve seen some controversy lately on how to handle an issue.

During the RNG CS:GO semi finals between teams Luminosity (Brazil) and Liquid (USA), a photographer accidentally unplugged a computer from one of the Luminosity players. Score was then tied 11-11 and the round was still featuring 4 players on each side. The American proceeded on winning the round and eventually the match, which caused much controversy.

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Luminosity complained to the admin that the round should be restarted.
The admin told Luminosity that is was Team Liquid’s choice to reset the round or not.
The community flamed the admins for putting responsabilities on the players’ shoulders.
Liquid argued that they followed the rules, stating that if the round has begun and events have occurred, it has to be played until the end.
Luminosity countered with the fact that this rule applies for hardware or Internet failure, but not for human failure external to the team.
Tournament’s head said that no team was to blame, neither its admins.

It was a mess.

This is neither the first nor the last time an issue will cause debate among players, admins and the audience alike. We all remember the infamous “Fnatic boost” during the Dreamhack Winter 2014.

Even though it all went to very specific and exceptional conditions, this issue put the spotlight on how tournament organizers have to think, design stick to their rulebook.

Here are our tips to handle those situations:

1. Have an exhaustive, thoroughly prepared rulebook
Complete rules covering even the most exotic situations are available all around the web. Find your inspiration from the major events and get help from experimented tournament admins.

2. Make your rules visible to everyone
We’ve seen too many times players complaining about a ruling they were not aware of in the first place. Make sure your rules are on your website, mailed to the participants and double check your admins know them by heart.

Here’s an example of a tournament displaying the rules straight from our widget. How smart is that?

3. You got this
Last but not least: you’re the one in charge. It doesn’t mean you’ll come up with the best decision (we hope so), but it means it is your responsibility. Situation can get very tense if you give everyone a voice. Hear the arguments from everyone, but don’t ever share the decision process, or your tournament’s authority will suffer greatly. And in a dire situation, you’ll really want to keep the lead.

TL:DR: have both solid rulebook and decision making ruleset

[Organizers] What is the maximum “Best Of” format Toornament can handle?

Last week, popular Street Fighter IV tournament “Kakutop” used a rather unusual format:

  • Round Robins groups into Round Robin final group
  • First to 5 matches
  • 2 games of difference victory condition

This lead to extensive matchups where some players fought from 5 (5-0 final score) up to 12 games (7-5 final score)!

Toornament supports “Best of X” match formats up to “Best of 9″. The vast majority of match formats use “Best of 3″ and “Best of 5″ formats, sometimes extending up to “Best of 7″.

We could easily extend our Match formats support to “Best of 11″ and beyond, but the visual representation of such series would suffer greatly, especially when seen in widgets or from a mobile device screen

When we covered the Kakutop 3 tournament, we went for this scoring format instead:

This allowed us to display scores while keeping it clean.

Kakutop and other events using exotic formats (Just Dance World Cup, anyone?) bring great challenges and inspirations for us tournament software developers. We can’t wait for the next one, bring it on!