Category: Toornament Update

The increasing popularity of the Nintendo new hybrid console brings brand new games to its catalogue. The ones with a competitive side are already available on Toornament, for epic competitions and tournaments! Here is a non-exhaustive list of popular Switch games available for you!

Do we really need to introduce Mario Kart? The licence is back in a Deluxe edition for the Switch, based upon its Wii/Wii U big brothers with new characters, karts and other features such as an 8-players local mode, a LAN mode and a fully unlocked game from the get-go. So time to throttle on and prove the world you’re the best Kart racer there is!

ARMS is a brand new fighting licence coming to life on the Nintendo Switch. You embody fighters with extensive weaponized arms, to try and knock out your opponent(s) in fast-paced and intense arms fights. The premises of this game are just too good to pass up on a tournament!

Splatoon is also back on the Switch with a new opus, soberly titled “Splatoon 2”, in which the goal is still to splatt ink all over the different levels, while the enemy team will do just the same, just with another color. New game modes, features and weapons are announced for the title, released on the 21st of July!

1-2 Switch is a collection of mini-games, bound to keep you busy for hours of friendly fun, but why not make things a bit more spicy with a tournament made up of several different mini-games, or to decide who is the best at Samurai Training or Soda Shake?

Pokken Tournament is a fighting game featuring our favorite pocket monsters. The game will be release on the Switch on the 22nd of September, but in the meantime, some tournaments are already happening! New characters are already announced for this Switch version, and more are bound to come!

Street Fighter II is probably the most emblematic episode of this emblematic series. It’s back on the Switch with a not-so-sober title, “Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers”, but the fundamentals are here, with all the iconic characters, levels and techniques that built the series!

Bomberman is back on the Switch with Super Bomberman R, a new opus of the famous licence, where up to 8 players will be able to fight until they explode for the win. New power-ups, 3D environments and characters and a solo campaign are here to propel this new game.

So wait no more, and create or participate in your first Switch tournament!

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.

Introduction

We’ve been hinting and teasing you with our upcoming Version 2 for almost 5 months now, and it’s time we put an end to it.

The Release Date will be the 31st of May!

The migration to the new version will cause an interruption in service on that day! More information to come soon, but the platform will not be available for a few hours during office hours (CEST)

Organizers, participants and spectators will discover our new platform, that is going to look a lot like the old one, but built on a brand new tournament engine, built from scratch on a new database running on a new servers infrastructure, allowing much more traffic than what is currently possible. For starters, changes will mainly be on the Organizers’ side, here they are.

Tournament Size

The maximum size of a tournament will go from 256 (current limit) to 4096 thanks to the new tournament engine and infrastructure.

New Structure System

More freedom, more flexibility! You are now 100% free when it comes to creating a tournament and its structure. You can have stages played along, of different size, with participants coming in at any stage of your tournament.

Learn more about the Structures

New Placement System

Along our new structure system comes a brand new way of placing participants into your stages. The seeding and the placement were merged into a single interface to allow for a clearer experience, with new options for you to choose who plays where.

Learn more about the Placement

New Widgets

Another field that needed attention were our widgets. They are now clearer and more user-friendly, and just as beautiful as the rest of the site!

Learn more about the Widgets

Other Changes

Many other aspects of the platform are going to undergo some sort of change, among which:

• Organizer Dashboard now has the same stylesheet as the other parts of the website, and an increasing compatibility with mobile
• A few changes inbound on the API, with more detail available next week
• Game stats (as seen in LOL, DOTA2, CS:GO or Bloodbowl 2) won’t be available immediately upon release. They will be back, with all previous data restored, as soon as possible
• Some least used features disappeared, to simplify the tool and make it the most efficient it can be

What to expect next?

The Version 2 being out means that we are going to go back to working on new features and improvements, after having spent those last few months dedicated to the task at hand.
We already made good progress towards some of the most requested features from our organizers:

• Tournament and match check-in
• Match chat system (first available on the web platform, on the mobile app next), as seen below:

This is just the beginning, so stay tuned for a whole lot of new features and exciting stuff to come in the future, because we’re only getting started!

In the scope of our new version, we have had to rethink the widgets entirely. Lots of organizers have given us their feedback, and we are proud to present them, and you, our new widgets!

All changes have been made with one main issue in mind: Clarity.

Being embedded on different parts of websites, widgets have to be clear, intelligible and easy to use. This could be achieved by following two guidelines:

• No more navigation. What you see is what you get. Chosen information is immediately visible and accessible.
• A modern, stripped down and refined style, to emphasize important information.

The tournament widget is now be divided into several separate widgets. No menu to navigate from one to the other. There will be a widget for each one of these categories:

• Participants
• Matches List
• Groups List
• Bracket
• Information & Registration

As of now, all widgets but the “Participants” one are available in their new version. The “Information & Registration” one comes with 4 variants depending on the current status of the tournament:

Tournament has not started yet

Tournament has not started yet, with registrations open

Tournament is currently running

Tournament is over

Here is the new look of the Stage-based widgets:

Round-Robin Groups

Bracket

And here is the new “Schedule” widget:

Matches Schedule

Those widgets, and the ones still to come will also be available in a Dark Mode shortly. And to finish, here’s a sneak peek at our “Participants” widget, which is still a work in progress:

With the Version 2 and its new structure system, we had to come up with a unified placement feature that would fit the role while allowing maximum flexibility. We decided to merge the seeding and placement aspects into a single interface where you can add participants into the phase (because you have to remember that now, all participants don’t have to start in the first stage of a tournament, and can be freely sent into different stages) with a multi-selection modal window. A seed is then attributed to them depending on the order you pick them.

Selection modal in Toornament v.2

From there on, you can manually modify the seeds, and it will naturally modify their placement in the structure accordingly, either in the list on the left, or directly inside the preview on the right side of the screen, just like you use to do in the current version.

Placement interface in Toornament v.2

It is now also possible to lock some of the participants in their attributed seeds. This serves one major purpose: locked seeds won’t change if you randomize the participants into the stage, meaning you can have seeds stay in place while you randomly add participants into the stage. Furthermore, re-generating a stage (by changing its size for example) does not alter the seeds, meaning all seeded participants will keep their seeds, and locked ones will remain locked.

Locked participants in Toornament v.2

Another major change is that this interface is now basically a preview, meaning you can edit things, try and test things out, but ultimately, nothing changes until you save.

With this new system, it is still possible to manually place each and every participant, either all at once before starting your tournament, or step by step, even after the stage matches have started (but a participant with a result in one of its matches will become locked).
Plus, combined with the new structure system, this will allow for stages played at the same time (like several groups played in different stages, qualifiers or anything you might think of), you will be able to add and play tiebreaker matches, or showmatches…

There is one downside to reaching this level of freedom though, and it’s the loss of hard connections between stages, meaning there is no automatic method between stages, so for example, when your group stage is over, you’re going to have to select the winners from said group stage and seed them into the playoffs stage yourself.
But that is a small price to pay for all the amazing things you will be able to do with this new system, and we’re not done working on it just yet!

As we have already stated before, one of our long-term goals with Toornament is to enable an easy and efficient in-game integration, to encourage developers, organizers and participants alike with their esport impetus. With the emergence of many new titles every week, we want to be able to provide the best solution possible, and that goes through an open discussion with the people involved.

We carefully listen to the remarks and comments of our organizers and participants, and now it is time for us to widen the scope of our feedback by addressing directly the game studios and developers from all horizons.

We have come up with a short survey to help us identify the challenges and needs you may have, as game creators eager to implement some sort of competition process in your game. Whether it’s with a real esport objective in mind, or for recreational purposes, your opinion matters to us!

Take the Survey!

Thank you for your time!

With the new Version comes the new Structure System. Currently, when creating a tournament, you have to choose a structure template from a wide selection. It’s quite simple, and presets allow for fast creation, but it can limit organizers looking to create more original formats.

From today on, the new system is out, and there are no more templates, no more limitations; organizers are now 100% free when it comes to creating their tournament structure. You can freely add, modify and delete stages in your tournaments. And because a few images speak a thousand words:

You will create your structure by adding stages to it, and can do so whenever you want/need to. As in the example, this means you can create all the stages of your competition in a single tournament (qualifiers, groups, league, playoffs and anything!), and imagine if you are having a great tournament, and suddenly, too many people want to participate in your qualifier, you can just add a new one! Each stage is independent, and can be linked to others to have participants move between each stage of the competition through our new Placement process.

If you wish to delve deeper into the different types of stages available, check our Format Guide!