Matches, Sets, Points

Everything you always wanted to know.

Matches in a escs have a very flexible structure to accommodate all the possible needs. But think of them as of matches in tennis Grand Slam tournaments. So a match consists of one or more sets. And a set consists of one game between the match participants: the time between the game start and the time when the game sent scores to the escs.

Now depending on the the game mode in your game, you might want to decide to let players actually play more then one game in a set - it is entirely your decision and you control it by deciding when to sent the scores to the escs. For example, in a game of Tetris you could let players play just one game before sending the scores to the escs or you can let them play 3 games and send the scores after the 3rd game, sending to the escs the cumulated score of all 3 games. How do you let the players and tournament organizers know about these details? This is what the game mode is for. Read more about it in the game mode section.

A game between players can be a multiplayer game or a single player game. It can be a real multiplayer (e.g. they, for example, race each other on track in a racing game or are participating in a deathmatch 1vs1 or 2vs2 and so on), or just a single player, meaning that they all play their own single player games (like solving puzzles and the one who solves it faster is the winner).

You can define the match structure for each tournament stage individually in the Advanced Match Settings. The question marks on the right side of each field contain helpful information.

Advanced match settings

First of all, in the match template you can choose one of the predefined match structures: Best of 1, Best of 3, Best of 5. You probably heard of them

Then you can decide if the match is going to be a multiplayer match or a single player match. It means following. In a multiplayer match escs will let the game know who is playing against whom, so if the game is real multiplayer game it can start a match for a matched participants. In a single player match escs does not send participants data to the game - just the participant's data that is actually playing on the device. Whether escs matches a player against other players depends purely on the stage mode (brackets, free for all, etc), player's amount in a set. This can create interesting structures.

Whether a player is then actually playing against other players in the game or plays a single player game depends only on the game itself.

Define minimum players in a set and players in a set. The latter parameter means that escs tries always to match this number of participants in a match. The minimum players in a set parameter tells escs how many players are needed at least to start a set (or a game). escs will create matches with at least that number of participants.

The next two important parameters are maximum number of sets in a match and the match end condition. For example, in a tennis best of 5 match the maximum number of sets is 5. After that the match definitely ends. And the match end condition is 3: as soon as one of the players won 3 sets, this players wins a match. In that example of a tennis match, each player gets awarded one match point for winning one set. Please set these conditions so that they make sense.

Now in the case of the escs you can decide to award players different number of set points for winning a set: you define in the match points field. Default values a like in tennis. Enter the values in the coma separated format. After the end of the set players are sorted by the actual points they scored in the game and the first player gets the first number of match points and so force. In case of a draw in game points, players are moved one place down.

You can also omit the match points entirely - in this case the points scored in the game a count as a match points.

Match points are accumulated during the match: how they are accumulated is defined by the match points aggregate parameter. Choose here what makes most sense for your tournament and game.

Match points are not stored between different tournament stages or tournaments. After the end of the match players are sorted by earned match points and get tournament points: in an exactly the same way as match points you can define the tournament points in the tournament points field. Tournament points are stored between the stages and are accumulated during the tournament. Based on the tournament points at the end of the tournament you can define the winner of the tournament.

If you omit tournament points match points are counted as a tournament points.

So if you omit tournament points and match points then the actual game points are counted as a tournament points. This makes the structure very flexible and allows you to create the tournaments that perfectly fit your game.

Set parameters are described in the game mode section.

Wait time for the player defines how much time the player has to press the ready button. If player does not press the ready button in that time, the player looses this set and gets awarded penalty points (status Ret. in standings).