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.
