This page walks through setting up and running a tournament through HiveMind. It will primarily go through how to integrate with Challonge for a live bracket that HiveMind can update and report to.

Creating a Tournament

On your scene's main page, click "Create New" in the Tournaments area. If you do not see this button, you are not an admin, have someone from your scene's admin team add you.

Enter details about your tournament in the next screen and click Save to finish the initial page. At the bottom, make sure to click the Challonge button at the bottom if you plan on integrating with a Challonge bracket.

Creating a Stage

Tournaments are composed of one or more Stages. Most tournaments only need one stage, so you can name the stage "Main Bracket" or something similar. Large tournaments may have multiple stages, such as a Pools stage and an Elimination stage.

Creating a Stage (Challonge)

In Challonge, create a new Tournament. Set the URL and description as you normally would, and make a note of the bracket's URL for the next step.

In the Game Info section, make sure to enter "Single Stage Tournament" even if your tournament has multiple stages (HiveMind will manage moving players between the different stages).

Make sure to pick the format of the bracket below the stage selection. HiveMind should support all format types.

Scroll down and click the (+) on the Advanced Options section. In Permissions, click the check on "Share admin access..." and in the usernames field, enter KQ_HiveMind . Wait until the auto-fill dropdown shows the HiveMind user and click that to confirm. This access is needed for HiveMind to report scores and advance the bracket.

Save your settings and return to HiveMind. Don't do anything else on Challonge; HiveMind will handle adding team names and creating the actual bracket. Keep the page up for now, we'll need to revisit it in a moment for one more step.

Creating a Stage (HiveMind)

Back in the HiveMind tournament page, click "Create Stage" to make a stage.

The following settings are important to set correctly:

Rounds per Match / Wins Per Match

Make sure to set either Rounds per Match or Wins per Match to something above zero, and leave the other one at zero. These work as follows:

• Rounds per Match: This number of rounds will be played, regardless of how many wins are recorded (So entering 3 would mean each set is a "straight three" and could end 3-0, 2-1, 1-2, or 0-3).
• Wins per Match: This number of wins are needed to win the set. The set will end when a team reaches this many wins. (So entering 3 would mean each set is a "Best of 5" and could end 3-0, 3-1, 3-2, 2-3, 1-3, or 0-3).

Challonge Organization

If your tournament is not being hosted by a community, you can leave this field blank. Otherwise, you will need to add your community's ID here. Go to the Settings page for your community and scroll down to the Subdomain. Copy this value (it will be a random set of letters and numbers if it's not a Pro community) into HiveMind.

Challonge ID

Enter the end of the URL for the stage's bracket (the one you set up in the previous step). So for a tournament at https://challonge.com/kqpdx061922 you would enter kqpdx061922.

Click Save, and the page will update will some new text at the bottom:

Copy the weird bit of text there and head back to the bracket in Challonge. Go to the settings page and add the text to the tournament's description (you don't have to erase anything, just add it to the end of the description). Save the settings again.

Back in the HiveMind popup, click the "Validate" button and HiveMind will be fully integrated. At this point you can remove the extra text from your Challonge description if you wish.

Making Teams

Back on the main tournament page in HiveMind, click the "Create Team" button. Make an entry for each team in the tournament.

Starting the Tournament

Once you have all teams and stages set up, you are ready to begin!

In the list of Stages, click the stage you'd like to start. Click the "Add Teams to Stage" button at the bottom of the popup. In the next screen, drag all teams involved in this stage from left to right. Note that the order of the list determines the team's seed, so in this list Baltimore is seed 1, Portland is seed 2, etc. When the team list is set, click Save to generate the bracket.

At this point, refresh the bracket page on Challonge and you will see the generated bracket. If you need to regenerate the bracket, you can repeat the last step with a different team list. Once everything looks good, click "Start the Tournament" in Challonge to begin the stage. Note that once you do this, you will not be able to alter the bracket.

Running the Tournament

Now that things are running, the only thing you should need to do is officially start each match. On the main Tournament page, you should see a list of online cabinets listed at the top. If you don't see a cabinet, check its HiveMind configuration and internet connection. To start a game, click on one of the cabinet boxes.

Click the "Reload Matches" button to see the currently available matches. Then, click one of the match boxes to start the game.

Ensure that the teams are on the correct sides (in this example, Seattle is on Gold and Wisconsin is on Blue). If this should be reversed, click the "Swap Blue / Gold" button.

The set is now underway, and game results will automatically be reported to HiveMind. Overlays that are integrated with HiveMind will automatically update their team names and scores. There are a few controls of interest during the set:

• Warm-up game: Check this box if the teams are doing a quick warm-up match. The results of a game will not be reported if this option is enabled. This option will automatically turn off after the next game ends.
• Score adjustments: Each team has a control for adjusting their score manually. You can do this if a game needs to be replayed or if some manual adjustment is needed, but generally this shouldn't need to be touched.

When a set is complete, the score will be reported to Challonge and the bracket will advance automatically. At this point you will need to manually start the next game by repeating the previous steps in this section.

Finishing the Stage and Tournament

Once all games are reported, the stage is complete. You can add teams to a different stage if you are running a multi-stage tournament.

Make sure your community knows about set results! Each match in Challonge will have a link to HiveMind as an attachment, where players can view the results of each game in the match.

Syncing Tournament Results With Video

Once a Tournament is complete, you can optionally add a video that syncs tournament game results in HIveMind to a YouTube video of gameplay. To do this, you'll need to gather some information first.

First, in the Tournament results screen in HM, click on a completed set, scroll down, and click a match within that set. It doesn't matter what the game is, but pick one that would be easy to find in the YouTube video (I recommend the first game in the tournament).

The page itself is not important, but in the URL of your chosen game, record the game ID in the last part of the URL.

Now on your video, scrub to the very end of the game you've chosen on HiveMind. A good marker is when the first post-game screen shows after the "Blue/Gold Wins!" screen. Note in the example how I paused when "Happy Hour" popped up. Once paused, note both the timestamp and the total length of the video.

Finally, note the video ID, which is the string of characters after v= in the YouTube URL.

Now that we have all necessary information, we can add the video to HiveMind.

In the Tournament results screen, click "Add Video", and then enter all the information we've gathered in the different fields. Click Save. HiveMind will take a few minutes to process the video, so don't fret if you don't see video right away. Once it is finished, you should see timestamped matches inside of every set result screen!

(Note: There is currently a bug where editing video entry data after initial entry causes an error, so be extra sure on the values you've entered before clicking Save)

If you have multiple videos, you can repeat this process for each video, and HiveMind will add the correct videos and timestamps to the result screens.

Known Issues

Changing ruleset mid-tournament

An important thing to know is there is currently no way to set different scoring rules for different parts of a Stage. For example, if your bracket is Best of Three but should be Best of Five for the Grand Finals, HiveMind will still run the final match as Bo3.

There is a workaround for this. Before starting a set where the scoring rules are different from the last set, go back to your Stage's settings (click it on the list of Stages), change the scoring rules (wins per match and/or rounds per match), and click Save. The new rules will apply to future sets, but will not invalidate results from matches already played.

Editing Tournament video bug

With adding a video to Tournament results, there is currently an error if you try to change the video details after initially entering them. Ensure you enter all video data correctly the first time you add video to a tournament.