Pandamonium

Fellow Playhemers! We have a special threat for you today.

Today we've added the check-ins for the tournaments. This is very helpful for any tournament which has a start time in a few weeks or even a week. Usually when you create tournament starting in a week it has about 40-50% of no shows. It's very convenient to use checkins to avoid that.

You can choose different options for when check-in is going to occur: 10 minutes before the start, 15, 30, 45. This is how tournament creation screen looks like with the check-in option.

Check-in will automatically begin within the time that commissioner set initially. Players who're participating in tournament can check-in during all that time (i.e you have almost 10 minutes for the 10 minutes check-in).

Each of the players participating will see the following:

If player is joining during the check-in period he will pass it automatically and will be ready to play in a tournament. People who've failed the check-in going to be marked as deserters in the list. This is how typical successful check-ins look like:

Few more things to note:

• You can only manually start the full tournament 
• Not full tourneys will start automatically, go through check-in and then begin if there are more than 4 players ready to go
• Prizing depends on the number of people that are joined since the prizing fund is formed based on the entry fee's
• People who joined and failed to check-in will get deserter flag and kick from a tournament plus no entry fee refund

We're running check-ins in a test mode. Please let us know if you have any suggestions or stumbled upon something when running a tournament. Enjoy!

We're excited to give you another bunch of updates related to the tournaments.

Join board improvements

This time we've upgraded the look and feel for the join board which is mainly geared towards bigger tournaments and Starcraft II, but other games players can find few useful things here as well.

From all our experiments table alike view proved to be by far more readeable than blocks grouped by 3. In this way we can also display more info relevant to the game itself. 

Custom prize distribution

This was one of the most requested features. From now on you can adjust prizing for the winners however you want to. For example it's really easy to make so that winner recieves everything or any other variation that's necessary.

We hope you've found this useful. Stay tuned for more.

Hey guys, it's time for another update!

Refined tournament listing

Few of the improvements:

• Switched the format to highlight actual start-time. We're approaching it from the same way that you attend the movies in a cinema. You should have a good overview of what's going on.
• Highlighting of joined tourney
• Full prize and spots showcase
• Division limits for Starcraft II

In this patch we've experience that you never know what someone on our team can come up with. As you may know there are always zero cases. For example when there are no tournaments in the list. I think we should call it Iurevych's lamp :P (by the name of the creator).

To fully experience this — go on tourney list page when there are no tournaments, hover over the area, enjoy.

Tournaments links recognition in chats

From now on when you post a link of the tournament — it will be automatically transformed into the title and name of the commissioner.

That's it for now. Enjoy and stay tuned.

Another bunch of updates for Starcraft II and tournaments. 

New create for tourneys

As you may know we're gearing up towards huge tournaments as a part of IGN's IPL, that why this part will get far more options in the future. Current concept is to split whole creation screen in two parts: main and secondary. For now date & time is going into secondary, however this may change. Other two additional parts are BO's and Map Pools (for Starcraft II only). 

Map Pools

This is a very specific Starcraft II update. Map pool allows for every commissioner to choose first map for each round of a tournament from a defined map pool.

If you have any ideas about how to spice up other game's tournaments with options specific to them like an ability to choose teams setup for FIFA — this is the time to let us know. 

Map pool that we're using so far (same as IPL):

• MLG Metalopolis
• MLG Shattered Temple
• MLG Shakuras Plateau
• MLG Xel'Naga Caverns
• GSL Cross Fire SE
• GSL Crevasse
• GSL Terminus SE
• SL Tal'Darim Altar

Enjoy and stay tuned.

We usually like to approach our tournaments in a manner similar to Lego: modular and with extreme variety. Our ultimate goal is to give maximum power and the best user experience to the players.

That's why there are even more goodies for tournaments in todays patch. This time we've added an ability for players to play more than one match in a round, also referred as BO's (Best Of). We believe it's a great way to make any kind of tournament more fun and fair too.

Every commissioner can choose BO's for their rounds in the way they want to. Example of how you can use it:

• Bo1 semi's, Bo3 for finals — 4 spot tournament
• Bo3 semi's, Bo5 finals — 8 spots
• You can even do all Best of 3 for 4 spots

More stuff to come. Enjoy!

Playhemers, we've pushed a new update today. It's mainly focused on improving AFK management for tournament commissioners.

If player fails 10 minute ready check — commissioner can handle the match results in the way he wants to. For example give a win to the other guy in the match.

Here is how ready check timer looks on the receiving end:

We're open to any ideas about how to improve this plus make it fun if there is a possibility. Let us know.

Tweet us @playhem or me directly @eventune.

I was recently digging through the old stuff. Funny enough i think i have like the oldest designs in the history of Playhem (former Gamesetcash). 

First logo that Ryan and the Band came to us with. That was 4 days after the company was created. Of course we wasn't very happy with that one so decided to explore a bit.

Few first sketches. As i look through them now Godfather alike idea seems pretty cool.

Final take on the Piggy Controller versus the Puppet Master. Piggy wins!

NB: I'm going to do more. There are many more old and ultimately cool stuff.

Enjoy.

...And meets a happy, hard-working monkey named "Playhem".

Today, Playhem is ecstatic to announce the implementation of a partnership with Destructoid, which to quote from their 'WTF is Destructoid?' page, is "that gaming news site with the robot mascot and crazy community". There's more awesome on that WTF link (including their sexy staff that spends so much time together so as to make the site feel 100% community generated) than we care to shake a stick at. From our side, Playhem is psyched to be invited to the cool kids table.

You want details? All D'toid devotees will see the 'fight' tab at the top of their homepage. Upon clicking, users will pass through a window (that Mrs. Destructoid picked out the drapes for) to be dropped smack-dab into the Playhem experience. At this new modern online soiree, they meet their friends to play games and tourneys for cash and prizes. The communities will be linked, there will be joint prizes / contests once the Dtoid users get comfortable in the system, and all will have access to challenge gaming around our sports titles, Starcraft II, and the many more titles coming soon.

As part of the integration, Senor Destructoid's iconic community-hosted 'Friday Night Fights' will be enhanced as Super Street Fighter IV and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 will be given the Playhem tech treatment. With all of the prizing that Mr. D'toid has drops on a daily basis, that generous soul will keep it's roots firmly emplanted while adding a snazzy new interactivity thanks to Playhem. As always, the 'Fight' community will be organized, hosted, and loved unconditionally via regular Dtoid posts from the jefes at Destructoid.

In short, we're fired up to have made new friends in the Destructoid team, and all friends of Mr. Destructoid are friends of ours. Let's do this. 

UPDATE: See the post on destructoid.com for partnership details.

Hey guys,

We have a special treat for you today — a new patch with a few nice improvements. This time we're focusing on tournaments and Starcraft II.

Commissioner Tools

Our initial vision for tournaments was based on people being able to run their own tournaments with friends and people they know themselves. There are few key points to this: automatic verification & commissioner tools which would allow players to run the tourneys without a need for dedicated admins. 

In this case the commissioner becomes a kind of superhero.

Running a tournament can be quite a task on it's own, but there always people who love to run stuff. Our end goal here is to take what can be a hard burden and turn it into a user-friendly, fun, and entertaining activity. 

That's why we now introduce a first set of tools. Very curious to hear your feedback!

Kicks for yet-to-be-started tournaments

Simple ability to kick any member from a tourney that has not yet started. The commissioner just hovers over the slot / player and voila:

Ability to award wins

That's an absolutely necessary magic trick for every commissioner. Right now it doesn't have any pre-requirements to use, however this may change in future based on how commissioners are going to use it (don't abuse it!).

To award the win — you need to click on the player in the bracket and choose the "award win" option from the expanded menu. We're going to use this menu in the future for extensions beyond these first commissioner functionalities.

Tourney-specific invite links

Running a tourney is a little bit of a marketing as well. We want to make sure commissioners can invite people very quickly and receive referral bonuses while doing that. That's why we beatified the link and it's very easy to access them on every tourney page. Here is what they look like:

playhem.com/#!/tourney/4702 — link to the tournament

playhem.com/#!/tourney/4702/by/Panamera — link to the tournament with referral

If you want to invite people who are not on the site yet — you need to use public links which are without #! (hashbang):

playhem.com/tourney/4702/by/Panamera

Disconnects and rematches

Before these commissioner tools, dealing with disconnects or rematches (in the case of a tie, for instance) was frustrating and without a solution. There was no way to go back and replay the match, or to change the winner of a match that otherwise verified incorrectly. Everyone of us had that moment:

We've made a very easy fix. From now on the winner will confirm the match result for every tournament match. As a winner you have two options: to advance or to rematch (in case of a disconnect or for any other reason).

Enjoy and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Quick signup for Starcraft II

One of the first pieces of user-feedback we received during preliminary Starcraft II testing was the difficulty of account creation in the case of a new Playhem user that was invited to a tournament. Playhem has 2 modes of play: head-to-head matches and tournaments. In case of a PC game like SC2 that lends itself to tournament play first and fremost, it's important for new users to see that they are signing up to the tourney rather than Playhem itself. 

In the previous flow, when someone in a forum (or on facebook, twitter, anywhere on the web) provided a tourney link, the new user would click the link and be confused on being prompted to signup for Playhem. Provided the user did signup, they then had to know to add Starcraft 2 in the 'Manage Games' tab, then find the original tournament they were linked to in the tournament list, and finally join it. Not the quick, most direct, or most user-friendly way to do it. We tried a couple of things, but a quick tournament signup is the best idea (we think, let us know if you agree or disagree).

With this any Starcraft 2 player being introduced to Playhem for the first time can signup for the tournament hyper-easily and join it right away. We will test it in the upcoming weeks and will make adjustments based on your feedback (as always) and the data as it comes in.

New brackets design

Funnily enough the new bracket design was ready to go probably around 2 months ago, but we were focusing on different things at the time. The main utility of the new design (apart from being prettier) is new statuses for each player. Everyone in the tourney including the commissioner can now clearly see who is ready and who is not. We hope that this, along with the other new commissioner tools, makes tournaments far easier to handle.

Improved tournament matches layout

Individual tourney matches receive a nice overhaul too. They get by far more contrast than anything else on the tourney page, simply because we want the players' eyes drawn to them faster. Same goes for the "I'm ready" button and different cases inside the match.

We hope that you enjoy the new stuff as much as we do! Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.