Today we welcome a guest author, Brennan Wright, to discuss offseason updates to our competition app!
With the spring competitions beginning next week, the product and engineering team at Generation Esports is thrilled to unveil the strides we've made this winter to enhance the competitive experiences within the Middle School Esports League and other Generation Esports communities.
After implementing the changes to the tie-breaking system highlighted in our previous dev blog, we began a comprehensive review of our processes and league rules to streamline them and ensure our application is meeting the needs of all leagues hosted on Generation Esports. We identified a few key areas for improvement where we could upgrade the coaches’ and players’ experiences, and better ensure fairness and rule compliance.
High School Registration for Solo Game Esports
This change does not affect MSEL coaches, as the legacy feature discussed here was not enabled for this community.
A legacy feature from the days of the pandemic was students’ ability to register themselves for a solo game competition, provided they were a member of an approved HSEL organization. Originally this was a convenience for educators, but recently had become a pain point as it vested the “ownership” of the registration with the student instead of the educator/coach. Educators lacked the visibility necessary to monitor their students’ activity in the competitions and ensure their online safety and successful match participation. Recognizing this gap, our team removed students’ permissions to register themselves into these scholastic competitions.
Roster Locking & Size Limits
Restrictions on roster size and when players can be added/removed have been a part of competition rules for years, but we relied upon competitors notifying us of infractions, and these restrictions were retroactively enforced. We set out to build these rules on the software level to better ensure fairness and integrity in our competitions.
Now, when registering a tournament roster, it must comply with the rule for maximum roster size. Rosters that are too large will be given a pending registration status and be unable to queue or receive matches (just like rosters that are too small). Additionally, the software will re-check this requirement when editing an already registered roster.
Once a roster qualifies for a playoff experience, players may not be added to it without approval from the competition team. While this was not a common occurrence, some teams would attempt to pool their best players onto one roster, rather than playing with the roster that qualified, and we needed to manually check our logs to investigate compliance. Now, our competition team may designate a roster locking period (again at the software level), where no participating roster may add players.
Editor’s note: No changes have been made to HSEL, MSEL, or YWC rules about maximum roster sizes or the roster locking periods. These rules will simply now be enforced by the competition app.
The Future
Now that the spring competitions are upon us, our team has shifted focus to assisting with implementing a new US-based digital learning solution for our Gaming Concepts courses. We're thrilled about its upcoming launch, promising a significant upgrade for both current and future Gaming Concepts schools. Stay tuned for updates on this new product offering in the coming months.
In the meantime, make sure your students are registered for their spring competitions, and we look forward to hopefully seeing you at HSEL Nationals!
Brennan Wright is a Senior Product Manager at Generation Esports. He has been involved with the High School Esports League since 2017; originally as a tournament operator and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive caster.
Brennan joined the product and engineering team after graduating from college. He draws on seven years of esports experience to lead the design of Generation Esports' competitive platform, which consistently sets industry technology standards across platforms operating scholastic esports programs around the world.
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