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.

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.

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.

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.

If you've already played on Playhem — you may know that we have head to head challenges. What you may also notice is that we tend to verify game results automatically. That's a very key and integral part to what we do.

Right now if you want your game to be verified you can:

• Setup an email inside the game (FIFA, NHL, Madden)
• Add your gamertag or Bnet ID/Code

After some time staying only with emails on EA games we saw tons of problems and mostly it's pretty hard to setup verification in this way. You have to know where to go inside the game, correctly input it using controller and don't forget to turn on that weirdly situated forwarding option. Ultimately that's not the best user experience and we don't want that.

That's why we're transitioning to the system without emails. It doesn't mean that we're stopping using emails to verify game right here right now. There will be a transition period. Today's update is a step in that direction:

We've added Finish button to all games except FIFA 11 in head to head mode to test out new system. The pipeline for any Playhemmer is very easy — add a game, create a challenge, ready up and play through it, then after you're done — either of you can click on Finish and we will get results from a very secret place :)

Let us know what do you think and how it works out for you. If it works well — we'll flip the switch and use it for FIFA as well some time next week.

Enjoy!

We've pushed the latest update with minor bugfixes and updates.

List of changes:

Features

• Bonuses for each 5 games played are back. Works for the forfeited challenges as well, but be careful :)
• Facebook & Twitter posting is now working for forfeits again

Fixes

• Battle history should now work properly in profile
• Tournaments creation should now properly work in all modes. There was an issue where users could create multiple tournaments at once.
• Friends auto-sync will now show proper notification after it's done 
• Ping noises for IM Bar now should work even in non-active (different) tab for all browsers including Safari
• Notifications in IM Bar. New message notification was appearing upon clicking on I'm ready. That's no longer the case.
• Changed the caption if you were challenging your friend from different currency mode
• Join button is no longer displayed when all spots are filled inside the tournament