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.
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