Tag: featured

Today, we meet with Yannick and Benjamin, the people behind the Arcana Cup, a tournament platform for Hearthstone players.

 

How did you start Arcana Cup?

We wanted to create a simple to use tournament platform based on solid foundations. We thus started to use Toornament very early on as it fits our needs and offer features never seen elsewhere, to retain control over the way we run our tournaments. We knew your API was in the works.

 

Why Hearthstone?

Hearthstone is the perfect game to reach a large audience. It’s both easy to learn, free and popular. Anybody can join a tournament in its spare time – and no need for a team. We saw the opportunity to run tournaments open to all regardless of their level or card collection.

 

What are your next goals?

We want to grow the platform and the community by adding more games – and maybe sponsors. As of now, most of tournaments award a little prize money, funded with our personal finances. Bigger prizes is one of the goals! The first step to this is being approved by Blizzard, our tournaments are now part of the HCT.

How is your typical event?

Very straightforward. The participant logs in with his Battle.Net ID and can then register for the tournament he wants. The day of the tournament, he then joins the dedicated lobby and can check his next opponent and current position in real time as the results are added. The hard part is to win the game 🙂
After the tournament ends, the participants rankings are into the general ladder account. We then run a monthly invitational tournament with all the best players

How do you rely on Toornament?
We use nearly all the API functions to generate and run our tournaments. The regular dashboard comes in handy when a manual edit is required.

Your future use of Toornament?
Our roadmap goes through more games and a higher tournament rate. We’re also thinking about Paid Registration, as we’re now Trusted Users.

Share your suggestions with us!
We can’t wait for additional API endpoints, like participants placement, or tournament description. And of course, running  tournaments with Paid Registration through the API!

For this year’s International, Valve gave less direct invitations. Only 6 team got their tickets for Seattle, leaving a lot of other competitors fighting in the numerous regional qualifiers.

Add to the mix powerhouses like Team Secret, Evil Geniuses and Vici Gaming and you get highly contested tournaments. As each region get its own qualifiers and these qualifiers go through 2 phases, tracking hundreds of matches and results can turn into a spectator nightmare…

Don’t worry, our coverage team it here and gathered them all in one place! Enjoy all the latest results, scores and stats on this post.

Stage 1

For the first time, Regional Qualifiers will start with a huge Round Robin, where everybody faces everybody in Best of One Matches. The best performing team of each region will get their pass to The International.

Stage 1 : Europe (June 25-26)

Stage 1 : America (June 25-27)

Stage 1 : China (June 26-27)

Stage 1 : South East Asia (June 25-26)

Stage 2

The winner of stage 1 qualified for the International 6 gone, it will be all down to the 4 teams which finished 2nd to 5th. They’ll enter playoffs where the winners will take the last spots for TI6. The runner-ups will then have to compete in a last-chance Wildcard tournament, where the two finalists will take the ultimate spots.

Stage 2 : Europe (June 27th)

Stage 2 : Americas (June 27th)

Stage 2 : China (June 27th)

Stage 2 : South East Asia (June 27th)

Happy following!

Our “Use Case” series are back! As we often feature professional events, we also want to highlight our amateur scene, with great grassroot and friendly events using Toornament.

Here’s how Nicolas from Montréal set up Toornament to manage his friendly Pokemon event, the Poké Party.

Hello Nicolas, let’s get to know you!

Hey Toornament! I consider myself as an seasoned
player – not a progamer though.

I started on Nintendo systems at a very young
age as I’ve always had a thing for video games that are both intuitive,
inclusive and competitive. My favourite games are Super Smash Bros WiiU, Mario
Kart 8, Tetris and Puyo Puyo.

Do you regularly organize
tournaments?

I helped and consulted on
some tournaments, but the Poké Party was my first as head admin.

What’s your goal with Poké
Party?

I’ve been inviting friends at my
place to play video games for some years now, setting up mutiple gaming spots and
playing all day. This time, I wanted to spice things up with a real tournament.

Why Pokémon?

Pokémon’s turns 20this
year, what a better way to celebrate than run a themed event? Some of my
friends actually never played Pokémon, so it was also a great way to introduce
them to the series, picking Pokémon Stadium on the good old Nintendo 64…

How, did you use Toornament?

13 participants showed up. To
speed up the qualification process, I went for the Swiss System format,
providing a maximum match cap for each player. The 6 best players then
qualified for the Single Elimination Playoffs.

We also projected a
Toornament TV on the wall, so that all the participants could follow the latest
results and keep up to date with their next match. One last cool stuff: I
reported all the scores and results from my mobile phone.

Any improvements and
suggestions?

I wish the participants could
report their scores and results themselves, so that I could spend more time
enjoying the event. But I just learned it’s now possible 🙂

Thanks for sharing your experience Nicolas!

Thank you guys!

For the second year in a row, we’ve powered ESWC’s famous COD tournament, making extensive use of our features and testing a few new ones. Here’s the breakdown!

1 Paid Registration

The Online Qualifiers for each region all went through our Paid Registration system to collect the participants’ fees coming from all-over the world.

2 Structure

The tournament organizers picked a “Bracket Groups + Single Elimination Playoffs” structure, and manually modified the Playoff seeding to even the rest time for all the teams.

3 Overlays

A premiere. Tapping into our API, the production crew was able to generate real-time overlays with all the results, scores and maps. The regular method is to manually check a match result and then create a graphic through Photoshop, before sending it over the screen. We all know this is a hassle which lacks reactivity and can lead to typos and errors.

These automated overlays are one of the numerous uses you can make from our API.

4 Toornament TV

The Toornament TV was the Gaming Zone welcome screen, so that every participant, journalist or admin could be up-to-date in the blink of an eye. It was also put to good use on the main stage and streams. Information is key!

5 Widgets

Most media such as Dexerto, Millenium and aAa used our widgets to display the latest results in real-time, allowing their reporters to focus on interviews, photos and analysis.

6 Mobile app

We advertised our mobile app to everyone from the audience to the players so that everyone could know everything from anywhere!