Toornament Blog

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!