Tournaments - Overview

[SOCL-Tournaments-01]

The purpose of this feature is to allow the game maker to set up a recurring Tournament for players.

This guide includes everything needed to use the Tournament Feature in the "Beamable SDK for Unity".

This is a social/competitive feature with an additional layer of meta game, periodic cycling of ranking/stages/tiers, and progression.

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Live Events

Live events can have a significant multiplier effect on engagement and revenue. Beamable offers these features to support this:

1. Events - A social/competitive feature that allows players to compete over a finite duration, where their in-game actions contribute a score to an event leaderboard. Events can have one or more phases, each with a defined duration. These phases can be interpreted by the game to mean whatever it wants. See Events for more info.

2. Tournaments - A social/competitive feature, but with an additional layer of meta game and progression. Unlike Events, Tournaments are cyclical. This means that you compete on a periodic basis, and the results of that cycle feed into progression into new Stages and Tiers (i.e. Leagues). Continue reading below for more info.

User Experience

When set up properly, the user experience in the game project will be as follows:

Glossary

Here is the glossary of Tournament terms.

NameDetail
CycleThe duration of time between each tournament reward phase (e.g. 24 Hrs)

Note: Cycles are written in ISO 8601 Format.
RankThe position of a player's score, relative to the game's community
RewardThe extrinsic payoff to the player, calculated by rank, stage, & tier

Note: Only Currency Content may be rewarded. Support for other reward types is not yet available
ScoreThe in-game performance of a player, often represented as a number (e.g. "100" points)
StageAn ordered grouping of ranks, relative to the game's community
TournamentA recurring competition between all players within a game's community, based on score ranking, stage, and tier
Tournament PlayerThe unique identity of the person playing the game
Tournament Player LimitThe maximum number of tournament players per stage (e.g. 50)
TierAn ordered grouping of stages, relative to the game's community

Tournament vs Leaderboards

Beamable supports many social features including Tournaments and Leaderboards. A game can incorporate either, none, or both. Both features help to build game community, encourage player competition, and increase player retention.

Comparison

  • Leaderboards - Simpler integration. Simpler user experience. No player rewards are given
  • Tournaments - Deeper user experience. Player rewards are given

See Leaderboard for more info.