Introducing Challonge Ratings

Elo ratings for your tournaments’ players and teams

This week we quietly released a powerful new feature: Challonge Ratings. Read on to learn how to activate our Elo-based ratings system and leaderboards for your events.

We have a new home. Check out our new blog to read on:

medium.com/challonge

Looking ahead through 2017

Challonge's new home, SplitmediaLabs, has some exciting announcements to make this year, some of which will most certainly originate from Challonge. Thanks to being apart of a bigger family, we're ramping up development efforts, so you'll see us tackling some bigger and more exciting features this year.

As we accelerate, we want to make sure you can keep track of what we're releasing, so as of today, we'll be maintaining a public change log for the site. Give it a glance occasionally to see what we're shipping — I promise it'll get more interesting soon!

View the change log

Challonge joins the XSplit family!

Today marks an incredibly exciting day for Challonge. After nearly 8 years and millions of generated brackets, I’m proud to announce that we’ve found a new home. SplitmediaLabs, creator of the renowned XSplit video streaming products, has acquired Challonge. And we’re not alone! SplitmediaLabs (SML) has also acquired Player.me, the social discovery platform for the gaming community.

While you imagine the implications, I’ll first mention that the Challonge community is immensely important to me. If this deal meant compromising the interests of our members, I would have walked away in a heartbeat. With this in mind, SML is committed to ongoing support of Challonge as a standalone platform, and the site will remain free to use. I’ll be joining the SML team as we accelerate the development of the tournament platform and build powerful new integrations between our products.

But back to the grander vision — Challonge dreams big. Beyond tournaments lie vast possibilities for connecting streamers, tournament organizers, players, and spectators, and discovery is at the core of it all. What do I mean by discovery? Try attracting viewers as a streamer or players as a tournament organizer. Try finding an event to participate in or a new live stream that you’re likely to enjoy. Discovery is increasingly difficult, and tournaments are just one piece of the puzzle. Fortunately, SML and Player.me share the vision of an innovative, connected community of gamers.

Our passionate teams are combining video content creation, a social network for gamers, and a widely used tournament platform — we’re committed to building something that you’ll love, and we’ll have plenty of checkpoints along the way to stay on track.

What should you expect next?

First up, you’ll see Player.me and Challonge enhancing each other with tournament discovery features and more in-depth player profiles.

Thank you for trusting Challonge with your tournaments and for supporting us along the way! Without your encouragement, we’d be nothing. With the addition of people at SplitmediaLabs and Player.me, you’re in better hands than ever, and we can’t wait to show you what the future holds.

– David Cornelius, Challonge! CEO


View the SplitmediaLabs, Ltd. Press Release here
View Player.me's announcement

Introducing our Reflex Bracket Engine

Last month, we quietly launched new brackets on Challonge that are powered by our brand new Reflex Bracket Engine. Given that we tried to keep the look similar to our old brackets, we didn't make a big announcement; however, what happened behind the scenes is a huge deal for us and a major milestone in the redesign of Challonge.com.

So, why the change? Our several year old brackets were inefficient to render and used a lot of old web design approaches that are no longer relevant today. They were holding us back from introducing features we've been dying to release and were forcing us to cap bracket sizes to 256 — even for Challonge Premier customers.

Highlights of our Reflex Bracket Engine

1. Vector graphics based — our brackets can scale to any size without loss in quality. The only limit is your device's pixel density...and your eyesight.
   
   
2. Truly LIVE printer-friendly bracket images. The images we used to offer were generated on the fly and were often several seconds or even minutes out of date. We're now generating SVG images on-demand with the latest data. And highlight #1 means they'll also come out of your printer with beautiful quality. Check one out here: http://challonge.com/capcom_cup_2015.svg
   
   
3. Fast! Our new brackets are incredibly efficient. We can even partially render brackets, rendering only the parts that are visible on your screen. This off-screen culling approach is similar to what you'd see in a video game — no sense rendering scenery that's behind you. With this newfound speed, we'll be re-evaluating our 256 participant cap.
   
   
4. Underpinned by amazing new tech. We're using React.js, a Facebook-managed user interface library, and a new Flux-based architecture to power our new bracket engine. The nontechnical version: we'll be able to offer an immersive new experience for tournament organizers, participants, and spectators. I can't wait to reveal more, but you'll have to wait for our redesign launch!
   
   
5. Extensible. Bracket designs are now limited by design imagination, not by technical constraints. Just look at what we built for Brackets For Good: stlouis.bfg.org. We'll be working on ways to unlock these capabilities to Challonge users.

As we begin to put our new arsenal of technical capabilities to work, 2016 is set to be the most notable leap forward for Challonge. Thank you for continuing to trust us with your tournaments!

Larger File Attachments

If you've ever needed to upload a large image or game file, commonly used by organizers to collect match result proof from participants, you would have been out of luck. The default 250KB size limit restricts you to small images, or forces you to find another host for your files.

Now, for tournaments hosted by Challonge Premier subscribers, the file attachment size limit has been increased to 25MB! Think of it this way: if you can attach your file to an email, then you can upload it to Challonge!

Large file attachments are just one of many Challonge Premier features. Upgrade Now!

Dashboard Makeover

For years, we've had a no-frills table of tournaments on the user homepage/dashboard, but today, we started rolling out a much more useful dashboard.

The old: (pay no attention to my ridiculous number of test tournaments)

The new:

What changed:

• You'll no longer need to change context from your personal account to organizations or teams; all tournaments related to you are now presented and easily searchable.
• Quick reference to tournament start time and states like "checking in" and "predicting"
• The option to archive tournaments to get them out of view without completely deleting them.
• Searching, pagination, and filtering without full page reloads.

A lot of time was spent on new development architecture and practices for this dashboard, so the best is yet to come to the rest of the site. Hope you enjoy the update, and please send your feedback for further improvements!

Power Up

Over the years, the Challonge community has grown enormously, but development of the service has been constrained by a part-time staff. Yesterday, that changed. Nearly six years since scraping together a bracket generator, I'm excited to have started full-time on Challonge.

I'd like to give a special thank you to Challonge Premier subscribers who have helped me make this transition! Many of you signed up primarily to support us, with the benefits of the service an accessory. Now it's our turn to return the favor and deliver amazing product improvements. We have a few coming right around the corner, and I can't wait to share them with you all.

Thank you!

Challonge Madness Layout

The Challonge Madness Layout has arrived just in time for bracket season! Premier subscribers can now take their 64-player single elimination prediction contests to the next level. This new option is available from the bracket embed modal:

Using the Challonge Madness Layout unlocks a new tournament setting that allows you to require users to share their email address in order to submit a prediction. This allows you to award prizes to top ranking predictions.

When a prediction is submitted, the user is presented with a link where they can edit or delete their submission. Users can view their prediction scorecard from this link once the tournament has started.

From an admin perspective, predictions submitted through the Challonge Madness Layout will appear almost as if they were submitted from Challonge.com (emails will be displayed to the tournament organizer on this page when available).

For a complete guide on running your prediction contest or to demo the Challonge Madness Layout for yourself, please visit http://challonge.com/madness.

January Release Notes

We've been busy gearing up for the March bracket season, including Brackets For Good, but here are some of the new features and revisions that shipped recently:

• API documentation improvements
• In round robin and Swiss tournaments, you can now rank by game/set win %
• Allow users to blacklist others from private messaging them
• Fix: Make avatars show up for group stage participants
• Fix: Allow API score updates to a completed match, where the outcome is not changed
• Nerd things: upgraded to Rails 4.1 and Ruby 2.2

Some of what's currently on our plate:

• Single and double elimination group stage support
• Site redesign (new dashboard included) 

We're also excited to have a couple new people helping out with Challonge, and I'm looking forward to sharing developments related to their involvement later this year.

Release notes for November & December

This fall has been incredibly busy! Here's a rundown:

• Round robin group stage support - over 6,000 group stage tournaments since this launched on November 19th! This was the top requested community feature.
• Modal/pop-up windows inside bracket embeds now use responsive css (better phone support)
• If you're accepting public registrations and using the check-in feature, the registration link will remain visible above your bracket during the check-in period. It previously vanished once check-was underway
• If you set your max # of participants as 256 (our current max), we'll carry a waiting list for up to 256 additional participants. Previously no waiting list was possible beyond 256.
• Bracket predictions now include a "rank" column on the predictions page, and the page loads way faster than before.
• BUG FIX: When using the linear scoring option for bracket predictions, the appropriate number of points is awarded for the final round.
• The Konami Code is back on our contact page!

Removing the mystery from our tie breaks

If you've run a round robin or Swiss tournament on Challonge, you know that ties are fairly common. While the logic behind our tie breaks is often obvious, that's not always the case! And when ties aren't broken how you'd like, there's nothing you can do... until now.

Challonge tournament organizers can now define three tie breaks in advanced options. If you like our defaults, no need to look, but if you've been craving more control or transparency, you now have it.

Release notes - Mark underway matches

• Allow admins to mark open matches as "in progress." This allows you to keep track of the matches that have been assigned a console / table /etc. The label to the left of an in-progress match is orange and updates in real-time with the rest of the bracket. This is currently geared toward admins, but this will prove to be especially useful for spectators down the road.
  
• Tournaments you've voted in are no longer displayed on your dashboard.
• FIX: in rare instances, rounding errors showed up when calculating round robin and swiss participant stats, showing too many digits after the decimal. This is fixed.
• FIX: printer-friendly live images no longer show blocks in place of less common Unicode characters
• Beta testing is underway for two-stage tournaments (group stage + final stage -- e.g. World Cup) 

Release Notes - More love for touch devices

• Added drag and drop support for touch devices (including Android and iOS) for participant reordering, swapping of participants in brackets, and bracket predictions.
• When someone is not logged in and views match times, they are now displayed in the tournament host's timezone. We previously defaulted to US Eastern time.
• Match times are assigned with a date & time selector widget now. This was previously done with 6 painful drop-down lists.
• Admins can now view bracket predictions before a tournament is started.
• FIX: API support for org subdomains with dashes
• FIX: Bracket predictions for 2-3 player brackets

Release notes - week of August 22

• Participant check-in was deployed last week (more on that here soon)
• Match history links on the standings page now link to their respective match details
• API: Add participants in bulk
• "Best of #" can now be specified for a round. This is styled differently in round headers, sets the default number of form fields when reporting scores, and impacts match notifications.
• Smaller and more appealing site header for phones (let us know if it doesn't look appealing to you)
• FIX: Discussion post formatting should match what was shown in the editor
• FIX: iOS score reporting

Challonge Premier just got better

Today we're taking a step toward retiring bracket module credits. Effective immediately, as a Premier subscriber, you can embed your brackets on other websites without advertisements.

Q: What is Challonge Premier and how much does it cost?
A: Premier removes advertisements from your experience on Challonge.com, allows you to embed your brackets without ads or usage limits, and supports us so we can continue to improve our service. It is available for $5.99/month, or $29.99/year. Find more info and subscribe at challonge.com/premier

Q: How do I embed a Challonge bracket?
A: Instructions are at challonge.com/module/instructions

Q: What happens if I already have module credits?
A: Your credits will continue to be usable, but we'll only deduct from your balance if you are no longer a Premier subscriber. If you want to cash in your credit balance and have a Premier subscription, let us know and we'll gladly do so via PayPal.

Q: Can I purchase additional module credits?
A: No. Once your credit balance reaches 0, you'll need a Challonge Premier subscription to embed your brackets without advertisements.

Thanks for your support!

Social Text

(Click to enlarge or view on Challonge)

Challonge Premier

Whenever the Challonge team attends a LAN event, the users of our service we run into always ask the same question: 'How does Challonge make money and what can I do to help keep Challonge around?' We appreciate the positive feedback we receive (this has always been our development fuel), but until now we haven't had any formal way for users to show their support.

Challonge Premier was designed to provide users of Challonge that rely on our service a way to support the team behind it. We try to keep the ads displayed on Challonge as relevant and as least intrusive as possible, but we think the layout looks better without them! With Premier, you will not see ads while browsing Challonge from your account. Please note: people who view your brackets will still see advertisements, unless they are also Premier subscribers. Additionally, we would like to recognize the users that sign up for Premier by displaying a Premier badge next to their username to publicly display their support.

We appreciate community feedback and support from all users of Challonge and would encourage everyone to get a Premier badge displayed next to their name! Click on the Challonge Premier button (displayed next to our ads) to get started!

https://challonge.com/premier

Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/challonge if you'd like to run into us at a future event you're attending!

Adam Oliver joins CHALLONGE!

We're excited to introduce Adam Oliver as our Social Media Manager!

Adam, a fellow Midwesterner, will be joining us remotely from Lee's Summit, MO. As Project M's leader, he's an experienced software project manager, successfully elevating the game from a small side project to one of incredible popularity. Additionally, he has organized and participated in numerous tournaments, adding a valuable perspective to the Challonge team.

Adam will be promoting tournaments and helping us align our development efforts with the needs of tournament organizers. Give him a shout at @challonge or @Strong_Badam, and if you're in the Chicago area, join the entire Challonge team at UFGT on May 23-25!

We're looking for a social media manager

Challonge is looking for someone to manage its social media. This is a part-time contract position for someone who's familiar with Challonge and in tune with the tournament scene, especially eSports.

Responsibilities include:

• Posting to Twitter/Facebook/G+ 2-3 times per week
• Responding to and/or escalating mentions
• Highlighting new or lesser-known features of Challonge.com
• Highlighting noteworthy tournaments
• Communicating with Challonge developers

We're a small company of part-timers with a big user base, so there's plenty of room for growth in this position. Give us a shout if you're interested!

March Madnonge 2014 is here!

New year, same ridiculous name. We're excited to host another year of bracket pools for the NCAA men's basketball tournament: March Madnonge 2014!

If you're like us, you're a fan of the tournament but not a fan of signing up for convoluted bracket contests. With this in mind, people you invite to your pool are not required to create accounts. They simply are invited to a fill out a bracket. Good luck with your prediction!