Category: Toornament Update

After the MOBA and the Battle Royale, make way for the Auto Battler fad!

A new game genre has taken over the charts recently, the Auto Battlers, with Auto Chess paving the way for Dota Underlords and Teamfight Tactics, created by Valve and Riot Games respectively.

The premises of the genre are quite simple, with a few players entering a game from which only one will emerge victorious after the others have been eliminated. To achieve victory, you will have to purchase characters (heroes, legends or champions, depending on the title), and equip items on them. Buy several copies of a single character, and see it evolve to a higher level. Combine characters with common race or class, and build a balanced team with bonuses and buffs to defeat your enemies.

At its core, it’s a new kind of death-match game, with around 10 players starting a game, and being eliminated one after the other, when their health reach zero.
And we have the perfect stages for you to organize competitions on such games on Toornament: the Free-for-All structures!
We have also devised a complete guide for you to build your first Auto Battler tournament, how to define your specific rules and match formats.

Localization is here!

Our developer team has been hard at work to adapt the whole website for localization. We are glad to announce that Toornament is now fully ready to receive new languages, and the first ones are already available!
You can select your language from the navigation menu (located bottom of the sidebar in the Organizer Dashboard):

Toornament currently supports English (UK), English (US) and French.
The difference between UK and US English being the way the dates and times are displayed, with the AM/PM system and MM/DD/YYYY format for the US English locale.

The website is now ready to receive new languages, and the next ones to come in the upcoming weeks will be, as planned:

  • Spanish
  • Portuguese
  • German
  • Polish

Please let us know if you think some translations need improvements, or if you meet issues with texts or dates!
And tell us if you would like to have Toornament available in your language, so that we can decide on what languages to be added next!

Improving our developer experience with OpenAPI Specification

We are happy to announce that Toornament now provides OpenAPI Specification (OAS) for its RESTful API, to deliver the best experience possible to the developers using the Toornament API!

“By applying the OpenAPI Specification to our API, we allow client developers to generate data models and SDKs from our specification files in minutes. Developers can also use REST clients to quickly test and develop their project with our API.
OAS was our go-to choice because of its tooling support and fully customizable stack, and it being an active and ever-evolving solution.”
– Olivier Paradis, Toornament CTO

As a reminder, the Toornament API can be used to improve your Event Production and build dedicated websites to display and manage your competitions (registrations, calendar, results, replays etc.).
Providing OAS support means that Toornament-based esport websites such as the Rainbow Six French League Official Website and Splatoon 2 Esports Platform are easier than ever to develop!

OAS support is included in all of our API offers, and OAS files can be found in our API Documentation. You can also find a list of tools developed for OpenAPI on the OpenAPI tools website.
So reach out to us if you are interested in enhancing the esports experience you provide!

How about some Bracket Optimization?

Following feedback from our community, we improved the way our brackets are displayed on the website, to make them clearer and condensed. This will allow for more information to be visible at the same time on a page, along a better readability of a bracket stage:

Click to see the side by side comparison

These stages are the same, and as you can see, rounds are now clearly designated, with match information visible at all times, and information about players entering the stage or changing brackets.
The bracket links are shorter, and the Winner & Loser brackets are separated to make them more compact, all while gaining in readability.
These upgrades are available for all bracket-type stages (Single & Double Elimination, Bracket Groups and Gauntlets)!

This is the first of a series of improvements to come to the brackets, with more to come for the matches!

Help shape the Toornament of tomorrow

Toornament is an ever-evolving platform, and some updates and improvements are mandatory to move forward.
We often call upon our community to share their thoughts about the other features, that are more quality-of-life improvements, and provide us with insights that only seasoned organizers can provide.
And here we are again, giving every user of Toornament the possibility to tell us what they think about the platform, its features, and what would be the best choices moving forward.

In that regard, we have devised a short survey for you to fill, if you wish to add your voice to the ones we will hear when developing our next features:

Thank you for the time you take to help shape what Toornament will become, we really appreciate it!

New feature: the Tournament Playlist

One of the challenges a tournament organizer has to face is getting the word out. Toornament already provides tools such as the Widgets to convey information about an upcoming competition, and a new one is added to the list today: the Tournament Playlist.
This is a page where any user can create a selection of tournaments, to be shared as a whole page, or via a new Widget:

This is especially useful for LAN Parties, such as the 2019 Gamers Assembly above, that gathered all of their 2019 tournaments in a single playlist. But there are many other situations where a playlist comes in handy, like for the League of Legends “Grosse Ligue”, the French university league. The competition is first played on a regional level, and here are all the regional tournaments:

These are examples, but there are many other cases where it might be useful, would you want to share the tournaments you have participated in, or simply want to create a list of tournaments you want to share! Go ahead and try the Playlists, they are available for everyone!

New bracket format available: the Gauntlet

We introduced with our recent structure update the Gauntlet bracket, a format that our organizers have been asking for, and we are delivering!
A Gauntlet is a type of duel-match bracket used as final stage in a tournament, usually following a League or Swiss Stage. It is a mono-branch single-elimination bracket in which only a handful of teams will play, with an important advantage given to the highest-ranked teams from the first stage.
In fact, in this type of stage, you place participants in matches up to the grand finals, depending on their #Seed:

This format is widely used in League of Legends Asian leagues, and is gaining traction in Europe too, with this season’s French Official League planning to use it aswell.
Here is an example of this new stage in our widget:

Introducing Brackets for Free-for-All tournaments!

Our latest Structure update brought two new Free-for-All structures to our ever-expanding list, and those have been among the greatest challenges we have had to face. But we prevailed, and are proud to present to you our two new additions:

FFA Single-Elimination Brackets

These brackets work just like the standard Duel ones, except there can be up to 100 participants in a single match, with a portion of them advancing forward in the next round.
We adapted the rules of the standard duel brackets to the Free-for-All format, with a smart distribution of seeds in matches between rounds and no re-match between participants for as long as possible, thus keeping everything that makes a bracket interesting and competitive. Our FFA brackets are not just a linear series of matches where people will keep playing against the same opponents every time!

FFA Bracket Groups

We also created a variation upon this new format, with FFA Bracket Groups, that allow you to split your participants into several groups, where they will play Single-Elimination FFA Brackets to qualify for a final match or bracket!

With these two new structures, we confirm our will to remain the leading technology for all things esports, and no doubt our organizers will make good use of these new structures! And with the increasing number of Super Smash Bros Ultimate and Apex Legends tournaments, to quote only a few remarkable examples, no doubt the need for more advanced structures was becoming a pressing one, and here they are!

The Toornament API now has Webhooks!

We are excited to announce that Webhooks are now part of the Toornament API! Webhooks are a way for two applications to quickly and easily communicate with one another. Think of it as a ‘reverse API’, our Webhooks will let your application know that something happened in one of your tournaments, without the need for you to monitor everything at all times.

Our current set of webhooks, bound to be expanded, covers the whole spectrum of participant actions, from the registration to the check-in, so that you get notified whenever a participant performs an action in one of your tournaments, so you can automatically act upon it, or receive a notification, or build anything you want, really!

For example, imagine you want to send newly-registered players a customized email, thanks to the registration.created Webhook, you will receive a notification when a new registration is created in your tournament, and you will be able to configure any reaction you want to it, including custom emails!

This is a huge step to leverage the Toornament technology and to develop your own platforms (such as the French League of Legends official league or the Splatoon 2 tournaments website)!

You can find more about our Webhooks in our Developer Documentation, and don’t hesitate contacting us for questions and business inquiries!

What happened in 2018 on Toornament?

Another year is coming to an end already, and it is time to pause for a minute and do a quick retrospective on what happened on your favorite esports platform in 2018.
Back in 2017, we released the V.2 of Toornament, and kept building on its strong foundations to make sure the platform spearheaded the esports ecosystem.
This translated into a +100% growth this year (in number of tournaments created), so huge thanks and congratulations to our organizers!

New Features

Structure

The most important feature that was added early 2018 was the Free-for-All update, especially designed for Battle Royale games, with advanced settings and scoring options.
In the same update, we also revamped the Match Settings entirely (to accommodate the new ones for Battle Royale), and added Double Finals configuration for Double-Elimination brackets (with the possibility to have a Grand Finals reset for the Winner Bracket finalist).

For Organizers


One of the main features we brought for organizers in 2018 was the ability to declare a participant Forfeit in a match, and attribute penalty points for said forfeit.
Other features to ease up the organizers’ life include Tournament Duplication and Registration Auto-Accept.

For Participants


We of course do not forget participants in our efforts to provide the best esports platform there is, and the main one this past year was probably the Tournament Check-In, which is of course made for both organizers and participants.
Other new features include the ability to edit one’s registration and the Krosmaga Pick&Ban.

For Developers


As we want to be the leading B2B esports solution, we strongly invested in our public API, which has seen some major improvements this year, with new endpoints and webhooks currently being tested!

For Partners

And because our platform would mean nothing without its amazing community of talented organizers, we developed the Tournament Playlists to let our Organizer Partners gather their tournaments in a single list, and share it via one of our well-known widgets!

Improvements

Design


Concurrently with the new features, the interface of the website has evolved, with many design improvements to make it more user-friendly and accessible. The major enhancement was the Responsive Layout of the whole platform, for people to use it from their mobile browser in the best conditions.
The platform also received several upgrades, with the new dynamic Organizer Dashboard that accompanies organizers in their tournament management, the new Match Sheet developed with the experience gained from the Free-for-All formats and a brand new and better Tournament Creation Process.

Other


Another important update this year was the addition of Tooltips and Revamped Settings to provide contextual help and a better navigation experience.

Upcoming in 2019


It would be an understatement to say that 2018 was a good and interesting year, and as you may have noticed the trend, we plan on making the next one even more incredible. As of now, we are working on two projects that should keep us busy for the Christmas holidays, and that you may already have heard about:

  • The FFA Brackets to build complex structures for your favorite Battle Royale games, Racing Sims or Smash Bros!
  • Localization of the platform in several languages, to make it available to most people.

And that’s just the beginning, with many more to come, so rendezvous in 2019!