Category: Toornament Update

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!

Are you ready for Super Smash Bros Ultimate?

The new opus of the most famous crossover fighting game launches tomorrow, and the competitive scene is ready… Are you?
With more characters than ever, there is plenty of choice for you to find the one character that you like and are good with to climb the ladder and reveal the champion that lies within!

The tournaments started as early as this summer, with the Invitational tournament held during the E3 at Los Angeles:

The game has a bright future ahead of him, and we can not wait to see what our organizers have in store, especially with all these Smash tournaments already popping up on the platform, hours before the release!

The FFA Brackets are coming to Toornament!

How about an early Christmas? Ever since we released the Free-for-All on the platform, we knew the next big step structure-wise would be to provide a satisfactory bracket solution, for you to have participants move forward after a match.
We have been working hard to make sure that the bracket would be sound, with an algorithm specifically designed for FFA, for participants’ progression and respecting competitive integrity.

We could have just increased the number of people in matches, and have winning players move in the next match, along with the other players from their match. But that means two winning players would keep being in the same game until the end of the stage, or one of them was eliminated. So we devised a new algorithm, that will split players in matches to make sure two players do not play each other again too soon (of course, they will meet again in the Finals if they keep winning, just like in a Double Elimination Bracket).

The players (represented by different colors) are dispatched into different matches so they meet again at the latest stage possible in the bracket (here the Grand Finals).
But this one is easy, with 4 players and 2 qualified players per match… But what if there are matches with 100 players, and 20 of them qualify? Or matches of 9 with 3 who qualify? Well, it works too!
This new bracket will be set up using its size, just like any other stage, but also how many participants will take part in each match, and how many of them will win in each match, to qualify for the next round. This will allow you to alter the structure and create the bracket you really need!

So stay tuned for more information about this new complex stage soon!

Ring of Elysium, the new Battle Royale sensation, has arrived in Europe!

Ring of Elysium is now available on the European Servers of Steam!
This Battle Royale, made by Tencent, has a few new mechanics that really make it stand out from the crowd, namely the Mobility Packages, a simplified inventory management, choice of deployment on a map etc.

If its competitive aspects are still to be proven, the game is definitely fun, and trying it with friends is a no-brainer if you are into the genre!
Plus, it’s free to play, with skins to unlock and other goodies.

Its map and mobility options offer a fast-paced and tense gameplay that is somewhat closer to Islands of Nyne than PUBG, for those who want the thrill of surviving the longest possible, but while offering a quick and action-packed experience.

So it comes to no surprise that the game has been available on Toornament since its first release on the Garena client, and with Custom Lobbies punctually available (and hopefully definitely soon!), you should give it a try, and why not organize your own RoE Tournament?

New tournament creation interface

We want to make the tournament creation and configuration process as quick and easy as possible for our organizers.
To that end, we today update the tournament creation process, by making it a single page with advanced and smart fields, so creating a tournament is faster and easier than ever! Indeed, the suggested games now depend on your own history of tournament creation, so if you are a true fan of a game, you will see it pop first in the list!

That follows the previous update to the Organizer Dashboard which became more user-friendly, to guide you through all stages of your tournament configuration, while putting the important features forward.

Go ahead and try it out, and as always, let us know what you think about it!

New structure widgets are available!

Tournaments organized on Toornament.com all come with a set of Widgets, for organizers to share their tournament information easily on any website.
Until now, available widgets were as follow:

  • Registration
  • Tournament
  • Schedule
  • Stage

We have drastically increased the number of widgets available, by adding all levels of structure to the widgets that you may now use. Indeed, you can now not only display a stage in a widget, but also a group, a round, a match or even a single game!

Group Widget – League of Legends Worlds 2018, Play-In Group Stage

Match Widget – FaceIT Major London 2018 Grand finals

FFA Game Widget – Fortnite Royal Rumble All Stars

These widgets will let you display what you deem the most interesting or important about your tournament, or share individual matches with your press services or other partners
To learn more about these new widgets, and how to use them, see our Widget Guide on the Help Center!

Toornament starts its localization project!

Democratization of esports means that more and more people get into it, and we want to make sure that Toornament, the most advanced technology for esports, is easily available to the majority of esports enthusiasts. This goes through providing an interface in several languages, and thus, we are starting a project to translate our whole environment.

First step will be to make the platform available in these languages:

  • French
  • German
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Spanish

… with many more to come!

To that end, we want to call upon our amazing community’s knowledge, to create a foolproof Glossary of the technical terms used on the platform, so if you want to take part in this project with us, learn more about it in our Help Center article.