Starting this month, we will be publishing monthly development updates. Our goal is to shed light on what the Battlefy team is working on behind the scenes, and you in the loop when it comes to key feature changes. We have made a ton of important improvements recently and are driving towards some big items in the near future.

We are always looking to improve, and your feedback is a big part of making that happen. If you have some direct feedback about our features, platform, or anything else — please email feedback@battlefy.com, or shoot us a DM on social.

WHAT’S NEW?

Feature Updates

For Organizers

• Improved tournament ratings is something we’ve wanted to do for a while — and the first iteration has arrived. Players can rate after a tournament starts, and will now be prompted to rate tournaments after they’re completed if they haven’t already. These ratings are now visible to tournament organizers, making it easier to track overall progress and success of tournaments. It’s important for organizers to get real feedback from players so they can improve tournament ops going forward, and this is the first step towards building out a robust rating system in the months to come. Note: in this early iteration, organizer ratings are not currently displayed publicly to players.
• Match Tracker 1.0. As part of our drive towards a better experience for admins, we have developed some big improvements for games we are directly integrated with. The improvements are focused on improving visibility around actions that users take on the platform and in the game client, so admins can better facilitate a smooth tournament experience. Right now we are testing these with Clash Royale, but based on community feedback expect these to be rolled out to more games in the near future. Here is a sneak peek on what we have been up to:

1. The ability to see if a match is currently in progress by reading the tournament API and relaying that information to the organizer.
2. The ability for an organizer to cancel and resend match invites on behalf of players, in the case that a match becomes stuck in the mud for some reason.
3. Matches listed by round. Based on community feedback, this allows tournament organizers to easily see which matches are holding up a bracket in progress.
4. The sequence of events in each match so an organizer can easily see the actions that players and admins have performed. (e.g., Player A sent the game invite @ 11:03:45, Player B accepted/declined the invite @ 11:04:02, etc.)

• Tournament Dashboard 2.0. We noticed our power organizers (Marock Tournaments ran 169 tournaments last month! Talk about community building!) were performing a diamond Starcraft level of actions per minute during their events. Over the years, we have built many features for organizers, placing them in the platform by convenience. As part of this product, we reviewed the product holistically and decided that consolidation was in order. With the launch of this product, all the steps an organizer takes have now been centralized, saving you valuable operations time. As with our improvements to tournament actions visibility, which is currently available for Clash Royale. We will continue to roll this out for more games depending on the feedback we receive from organizers. Keep the feedback coming!

For Players

• New system for seeding brackets. Based on feedback from the Hearthstone community and organizers across the platform, we have made changes to how bracket seeding is managed for all games. Tournament brackets will now begin as “draft brackets” until confirmed by the administrator. These will still be visible by everyone in the tournament, but works to prevent situations where reseeding can lead to players missing match check ins or accidentally playing matches that were never intended to be played.
• Improved management of player registration information. We made some major changes about how we think about and store player tournament information. This is part of an ongoing project around improving the registration experience for players, whilst also making it easier for Battlefy to create bespoke registration processes for different types of tournaments and games. The way we are implementing this project will also result in the improved storage of players in-game information.

General Improvements

For Players

• Fixed an issue with account linking in player profiles by leveraging features of Auth0. This will allow easier profile connections with third-party accounts such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Battle.net.
• Added the ability for players to “self drop” from Swiss stages. This removes the need for admins to manually drop players who no longer want to participate. This one’s for you, Hearthstone ❤.
• Improved our community prizing program review process, as well as providing a revamped experience for tournament organizers to monitor the state of their application and submission. We are going to continue adding more automated features to make it easier than ever before for tournament organizers to get in-game rewards and cash prize money into the hands of their most dedicated players.
• Fixed an issue where sometimes players would not be prompted to accept the rules for a tournament if they’d previously joined a tournament. This was related to how the acceptance state of critical rules was stored in the user’s client. Acceptance on the client-side is now tracked separately for each tournament.
• Security audits and improvements on how player info is handled around specific custom field inputs — this is part of the player registration project mentioned above.

For Organizers

• Added an improvement to how the activity feed is displayed for organizers. This was previously limited to 25 activities on the organizer management panel, and with the added pagination will now display up to 1000.
• Fixed an issue where seeding a double elimination bracket caused the winners rounds on that bracket to be calculated incorrectly. This was because the two grand finals sets were counted as winners sets, which caused issues with the mobile match list as well as best-of settings for grand finals not always being used correctly on the bracket.
• General changes to the tournament seeding flow. We adjusted the default number of participants seeded to use the tournament cap instead of an arbitrary value.

WHAT’S NEXT?

• Community feedback is an important part of our development process — all future monthly updates will include a dedicated community feedback section. This will outline key issues raised by the community that have been acted by the Battlefy team in the past month.
• We are currently testing different bracket structures with CCG and TCG games in an effort to improve tournament experience. More info on this as we gather data and determine what works best for the majority of players.
• The FIFA Game Hub page is part of a larger design initiative to modernize how to find your favourite tournament and competitions. The next iteration will focus on integrating more player and organizer data to make the experience smarter. Expect to see this experience for more games in the future.
• In the interest of capturing feedback from our users, we are building out survey tools in the near future. This folds into our larger platform-wide initiative to get direct feedback from the community on future feature releases and development direction.
• Robust organization ratings are something we are driving towards, and an important step in improving the overall experience for running tournaments. The initial version of these are live now, but we have plans to expand on this functionality in the months to come.
• We are currently investigating a new method for handling registration fields in tournaments. While we built Battlefy to be fluid and open, we crunched the numbers and realized the vast majority of our tournament organizers are asking for the same types of information. This is an opportunity to add predefined fields that improve the overall tournament registration flow and also help with data privacy and security.

For the latest updates and news from the Battlefy team, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. If you have any specific questions about any development updates, just leave a comment below!