Case study: Meltdown Tavern Hero

This season, Blizzard launched its exciting Hearthstone tournaments taking place in gaming bars, the Tavern Hero series.

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As the leading eSport bars franchise in the world, Meltdown bars were hosting several of these tournaments. Also long time power users of Toornament, they invited us to come and check how they ran the event using our solutions.

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Hearthstone and Meltdown’s popularity has always impressed us and for a rainy Saturday afternoon, it was quite a sight to see a filled bar!

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At the center of the gaming zone, Meltdown’s events coordinator Clément was gathering results and scores from the participants on the admin computer.

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The updated information was then automatically displayed on all the bar’s televisions through Toornament TV.

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Some participants were also using the mobile app to stay up-to-date with their next match schedule, especially the ones still in the winner bracket who traditionally have to wait for the Loser Bracket to advance.

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It wasn’t a problem tho, as cocktails and training partners were all over the place! It was a pleasure to follow the tournament and everything went smoothly for the participants and the audience.

All this with just one organizer and one eSport platform…

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Here are the final results for the Meltdown Paris Tavern Hero tournament:

eSport Watching Guide, week 3

As we cover more and more eSports tournaments around the globe, we thought it’d be a nice thing show you all the current and live events you can follow on a weekly basis.

Here are all the widgets you can check and share and of course, you can get all these scores and streams straight from your mobile with our free app Toornament eSports iOSAndroid). Happy watching!

2016 LCK Spring Split

Share the LCK 2016 Spring Split widget

2016 NA LCS Spring Split

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2016 EU LCS Spring Split

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2016 LPL Spring Split

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2016 LMS Spring Split

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2016 CWL Australia

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2016 CWL Europe

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2016 CWL North America

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Gold Series Heroes League 2015

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2016 StarCraft II StarLeague Season 1 : Main Event

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2016 DreamHack Open Leipzig

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Dreamhack Leipzig 2016

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This is how the Meltdown City Clash will award points

Following the release of our new Points Awarding settings (read more here), the popular eSports Bar franchise Meltdown will use one of them for its in-house League of Legends competition, the Meltdown City Clash – Winter Edition, starting this week.

12 Meltdown bars from different cities will face each other, calling their own customers to arms.

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Meltdown’s tournament director opted for a quite refreshing way to award points.

Based on a “Best of 5″ format and using “Match Score” setting, each match will thus award up to 5 points for the winner, as each won game means one point. This approach will make each series more exciting until the last game, as opposed to boring games when one opponent reaches the traditional 3 points mark.

Follow the Meltdown City Clash Winter on Toornament:

Check the customized Meltdown City Clash Winter Toornament TV page!

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6 eSports trends for 2016

We can all agree on how crazy 2015 has been for eSports. More games, more money, more audience, more recognition, spectacular announcements and acquisitions… It’s been one hell of a ride. Well, guess what: 2016 is already poised to be even crazier. Here 6 (of many) points to prove it:

1. Publishers are the rulers

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The heavy move the whole eSports industry was expecting is happening: video game publishers are taking control of their IPs. Following Riot’s steps, Activision-Blizzard has been continuously taking control back from the independant organizers hands. The recent MLG is the latest, most spectacular step in this way.

Valve, known for its more hands-off strategy, is also starting to weight in the way its eSports are handled. The Dota 2 and CS:GO major circuits and qualifiers do not prevent independant organizers from running their own events with their own rule, but they cast a huge shadow over everyone else, as they attract the top teams, the largest audience and loudest hype.

2. Players and teams Unions

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On the other hand, players and teams are the other major force to reckon with. The idea of a union has been rampant for years, and even tried by the main CS 1.6 at the time even tho it didn’t work. The latest attempt was a leaked requirements list CS:GO teams intended to sent to from the tournament organizers.
Despite failed projects and short-lived announcement, 2016 might be the year we see major clubs and organizations come up together with norms and ethics codes. We hope they start small and simple, to federate as much people as possible.

3. Here’s Television showing up late to the party

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Ah, TV. For years, eSports has been dreaming of the days it would be featured on national networks. It never really happened (sorry, CGS) in western countries. But for the last months, we’ve seen strong signs of television finally playing catch-up with eSports. ESPN and BBC started to air eSport tournaments (on their secondary channels, tho). Turner will launch a huge CS:GO league this year. Great news, but are they still needed?

Since a few years, eSports grew up outside of the TV screen and found its own way to viewers, with streaming. Twitch and Douyu wild success changed the game, as both eSports fans and professionals understood that they didn’t need Television any longer, they just built their own media. We’re thus very curious how traditional TV moguls will bring to eSports in order to challenge streaming platforms. When the hunted becomes the hunter.

4. MOBAs are plateauing

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Gone are the golden days of MOBAs? Not quite of course, as the genre remains the most popular in eSports by a large margin. But their spectacular rise seems to have to come to a stop in 2015. DotA 2 saw its numbers decrease a bit in September, even thos we can tie them to the release of the less-stable, more buggy “Reborn” client.

Last but not least, “Heroes Of The Storm” seems to struggle. Despite the heavy promotion from its publisher Blizzard, the brawler-styled MOBA doesn’t seem to eat at LoL and Dota’s cake and convert enough new players. The fact that none metrics have been released since the official launch is a strong indicator.
2016 might be the most critical year for MOBA. Will the genre fade like Starcraft, or prevail like Counter Strike?

5. FPS on the (re)rise

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2016 is poised to be the biggest CS year in history, with a record number of major tournaments, more players than ever (the 10M active mark has just been reached).

The FPS genre will also rise with the much awaited Overwatch from Blizzard and new milestones from the new Unreal Tournament open Alpha.
On consoles, competitive Call Of Duty may get a boost, with a popular iteration (Black Ops III) and the new in-house World League. Halo 5 is also working hard to get its community back together and reclaim its console-FPS throne.
After years of reloading, the shooting genre is back, all guns blazing.

6. Amateur tournaments level up their game

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As the top players in eSports are bringing our young industry to a new level, let’s always keep in mind that it’s strengh will always lie in the community and grass root tournaments around the world. And this is where we’ll weigh in as much as possible, bringing a solid backbone for both eSports professional and amateurs.

Use case: Dreamhack Tours 2016

For the second year in a row, we’ll power the Dreamhack Tours, which just opened its registrations.

Dreamhack Tours, May 14-16 2016

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Here are the advanced features they used to run one of the 2016 major event:

Official BYOC tournaments

Our core business: eSport tournaments management. Let’s power these great competitions.

Counter-Strike: GO – 32 teams
Starcraft II: Legacy Of The Void – 64 players
League Of Legends – 48 teams
Hearthstone – 128 players
Free Gaming Area – 128 players

Paid Registration

We handle all the money transactions for the organizers through our secured platform. To benefit from this feature, just apply for the “Trusted User” status (more details here), it’s easy and mandatory to “prevent identity theft, financial fraud, money laundering and terrorist financing”.
The Paid Registration process has been set up beforehand to open at the desired time frame.

Embedded Widgets

Our widgets enrich the Dreamhack website, as we can’t stress enough how showing all the information on one centralized place helps.

Custom fields

The organizers needed to gather important information, such as name/last name, age and game iDs and thus, created custom fields. They finally set up privacy mode to keep this data only visible to the admins.

API

The Dreamhack organizing team will be able to generate players lists, including the custom fields datas, to feed and optimize their CRM and Mailing platforms. Learn more about our free, open API here and here.

Check In

The critical choke point that is the Welcome Desk can use features such players checking, to inform in real time the admin team who’s here and who’s late. The API will also come in handy to help manage the wave of participants and audience.

Toornament TV

Our public display solution (main stage, information screens, stream) will help the participants, on-site and online audience to stay updated with the numerous tournaments of this Dreamhack Tours 2016.