Posted by donka @ 18:37 GMT, 2 November 2012 - iMsg
Last tourney i did was in 200x and i had to hand-modify a php template to make a simplest site for a game tournament. Took dozen s of hours of manual labor. I'd hope industry made a few big steps since then.
What sites do you know that allow you to easily spin up a custom tournament allowing the following:
I've tried challonge and it works fine. There is no check-ins however, but a pro is that players dont have to sign up to challonge to participate. BinaryBeast allows for check-ins but requires sign up to their site, an aspect that you want to avioid for small (up to 500 attendees) LAN cups.
I'm currently running a small duel cup on tourney.cc.
The site has a lot of positives, including easy use, simple layout, but I would really not recommend it for big tournaments, because after a certain size brackets become all screwed up. It has this bracket scroller that helps you scroll through the brackets, but it's a pain in the ass to use. You can open the brackets in seperate window, however when you do this it won't seem to open the match details. It's buggy as hell.
Also, brackets are done automatically using player ratings that you enter (for example, ELOs), and although you can move players in the brackets manually, it's too complicated to do.
I have no other experiences as an admin, but as a player I can say challonge.com is pretty decent. I especially like bracket predictions, it just adds to the fun to be able to predict the outcome of the matches, and see who has the most points at the end. :)
With binarybeast.com I had a problem at registration since the verification e-mail never arrived, and I never tried again.