The team

The team is the most important part in organizing tournaments. There wouldn’t be any tournaments without the people behind them of course. I have some tips to share generally about team working and specifically when organizing online tournaments. Organizing online tournament is a project, it has a very specific start and end point. It starts about four weeks before the actual tournament day and ends the next day after the tournament. This makes it easier to manage when you can create a schedule and break things down into smaller bits. It goes without saying that sharing assignments between the team is crucial. Before the tournament we have assignments for marketing, creating content, customer support, information communication, sponsor sales, product development. During the tournament we have different roles such as customer support, score counter and in game lobby organizer. In my experience the perfect size for a team when organizing a online tournament is three or four people.

Development

How do we develop our product? Mostly with customer feedback and keeping ourselves posted on the latest news and info about the game. In my experience you have to be fast when it comes to developing these tournaments, otherwise you are going to lose participants if you don’t do the required changes and tweaks on time and implement them in the next upcoming tournament. There are also many tools available for online tournament organizers such as Battlefy and Toornament which I highly recommend. Be have been using Battlefy for our two latest tournaments and it’s basically a platform where you specifically organize Esport tournaments. The participating teams register there with a code that is given to them after they pay the participation fee. When all the teams have registered we seed them to a leaderboard where they can view their placements during and after the tournament. 

At the end of the day, fun is what it’s all about.

I think that most of the participants in our online tournaments are in it for the thrills, for the chance to win something. Most of the participants know already that in no way they are going win when there are so many talented players competing against them, but they still pay the participation fee and take part in the tournament. For many these tournaments are four hours of entertainment on a weekend with couple of friends. They get to play together on a competitive setting as a team. So at this point when these tournaments are on a more casual level (because the participants are casual players) we are not making things too serious and it’s mainly about having fun. Of course we are moving towards a more competitive setting where the participants are more skilled and the prize pool is getting bigger, but for now the tournaments are mainly for the casual or average player. I am not saying that the fun stops the moment things get more serious. 

Checklist for organizing a Esports tournament

What to do and where to start if you want to hold a tournament? Let’s review the key preparation items:

• Decide on the budget
• Define the event objectives
• Decide on the prize
• Create a guest list
• Find a venue
• Select your ticketing or registration platform
• Build your event website and registration page
• Invite event guests
• Approach sponsors
• Organise marketing and advertising (email promotion, etc.)
• Identify and hire other vendors (if you need any)

References

Tomakh, A. 2019. How to Organise an Esports Event. Article. https://www.gevme.com/en/organise-esports-event/