prettify

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Swiss Tournaments


An often overlooked major feature on Challonge.com is the Swiss tournament format. While running a Swiss tournament on paper is a nightmare, we've taken the pain out of it to bring its many advantages over traditional brackets to light.

Swiss tournaments give equal play time to participants, pair players with others of similar skill level, and determine a winner in far fewer rounds than you'd anticipate. They're essentially smarter, abbreviated round robins.

First Round

Top seeds are paired against bottom seeds. Random seeding should be used if no ranks exist. For 8 players, the pairs would be 1v5, 2v6, 3v7, and 4v8.

Points

Match wins are awarded 1 point, ties 1/2 a point, and byes 1 point (or as configured). For multi-set/game matches, you may opt to award points for set/game wins as well - this gives match losers a chance at partial credit.

Additional Rounds

After each round, players are grouped by score. The top and bottom half of each group is then paired (same method as the first round), but steps are taken to ensure there are no rematches. Players float up or down between groups if necessary. When there's an odd number of players, a bye is awarded to the lowest ranked player who has not yet received one.

The minimum number of rounds to determine a winner is equal to the binary logarithm of the number of players rounded up (3 rounds for 8 players, 4 for 16, 5 for 32, and so on). On Challonge, you can opt to play more rounds than the minimum for more definitive results.

Final Results

Players are ranked by score at the conclusion of the tournament, with ties broken using the Median-Buchholz system.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Guidelines For Submitting a Bug Report

We love getting feedback from the community from the contact us page. When users submit problems they encounter while using Challonge, it helps us make our service better for everyone.

Recently, we received bug reports that we weren't able to resolve due to lack of information in the messages, so we thought it would be a good time to publish what we look for in a bug report so we can get your issue resolved as fast as possible.
  • Provide a link to the page where the bug happened.
  • Explain what you were doing when the problem happened, what you expected to happen, and what actually happened. The more descriptive the bug report, the better. 
  • Include a screenshot of the problem. (http://www.take-a-screenshot.org/). Include your browsers navigation bar in the screenshot.
  • Be sure to include your email so we can contact you for further information, and let you know if we've fixed the bug.
The faster we can identify the bug, the faster we'll be able to fix it! Thanks to everyone who does take the time to submit a bug.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Challonge's New Responsive Layout

We've been pretty quiet about everything that went into our December site update, so I thought I'd shed some light on the improvements related to mobile devices.

Our entire site now has a responsive layout, meaning it will adjust to the size of your device. For example, here's a tournament viewed from (1) desktop / laptop / tablet landscape, (2) tablet portrait / phone landscape, and (3) phone portrait.



Not perfect yet, but a it's a leap forward from what we had. Also note, bracket scrolling now supports touch devices.

Have a suggestion on how we can improve the mobile layouts? Please let us know!

Friday, January 4, 2013

Challonge 2012 Year in Review

2012 has been a year of maintenance for the Challonge development team. During the 2012 year, the code behind Challonge was overhauled to bring it up to date and make future development easier. We have many great features planned for the 2013 year to prove that Challonge will continue to be the ultimate source for tournament brackets.

Despite the lack of new community features in 2012, the Challonge community has grown larger than ever, doubling it's growth from 2011 (including our development team!).

2011

  • 6.7 Million Visits
  • 2.3 Million Unique Visitors
  • 23 Million Pageviews
  • 78 Thousand Managed Tournaments
  • 115 Thousand New Registered Users
  • 1.4 Million Games Managed
  • 1.1 Million Players Managed

2012

  • 13.3 Million Visits
  • 5.4 Million Unique Visitors
  • 37.9 Million Pageviews
  • 160 Thousand Managed Tournaments
  • 176 Thousand New Registered Users
  • 3 Million Games Managed
  • 2.2 Million Players Managed

We're excited about this growing community, and looking forward to 2013 as an opportunity to grow Challonge even further!