What is BattleID?

We’ve been keeping a close eye on where you guys are clicking (by we, I mostly mean me) and have noticed that about 60% of you basically leave once you get to the crossroads of “No BattleID?” or “Have a BattleID”. It’s a clear sign that you don’t know whether you have one or not, the page itself is stark, and you get confused and say “FUCK YOU BattleID!” and leave.

That page was never really meant to stay “stark” - I’ve been meaning to make design tweaks to that page since its inception a few months ago. The whole sign-up is a hack right now mostly due to we just needed to get it out there and see. We could have easily just sat in development mode for another 3 months and launched with a perfect application, but we launched instead, and have had plans to streamline important processes like the sign up since the beginning. The priority was to fix any major bugs (Week #1), re-integrate an important feature (Teams, Week #2) along with also fixing bugs, and any other smaller features that week, and then the third week would be devoted to streamlining this process, which is next week.

So what the fuck is BattleID? BattleID was an early idea. Some (coughBryan teh hackzorcough) would say too early. It’s a big idea that is in its infancy and is a long term system. It’s basically a global user system. A single username/password that lets you jump from one tournament host to the next. STORY TIME!

So lets say you enjoy playing both Starcraft and Team Fortress 2 - The chances that a single host would host a tournament for those two games are rather rare, at least we think so. So instead of having a unique username/password for each of those two hosts (sc.tbblive.com & tf2.tbblive.com as examples - they don’t exist btw), you would sign-in at one, and could jump between the two without ever needing to login or sign up again.

Okay, so you are still saying “Matt, WTF?” - Okay fine. Pictures.

Figure 1.1: http://screencast.com/t/Y2Y2NzFhY

The above paragraph summed into an image. But now you are like “but Matt, that’s not really a big deal?” - Yeah I agree. This user experience case is not really an innovative, break-through, OMFG where was my life before BattleID, kind of moment. This is why it’s a long term idea. That case is the short term. That functionality exists today.

Figure 1.2: http://screencast.com/t/MzlkMzNjNzAt

I’m sure you have a Facebook account right? Yeah, like who doesn’t. Again, nothing groundbreaking in this idea either. And in fact, this functionality won’t even benefit the early adopters of our services. This idea is just to make it even easier to sign up for a BattleID using an existing login from these services. Later though, we’ll actually hook into these services and let you post your results, tournaments you are in, invite your facebook/twitter friends to play in a tournament with you, etc. So that much farther idea is probably the biggest benefit to our entire user base for hooking into these services.

Figure 1.3: http://screencast.com/t/ZmJiYmFiNWMt

So this is where it gets interesting…we already have an idea for our second web application. Don’t want to spill the beans on it, but lets just say it’ll be awesome. So then you’ll be able to use your BattleID to signup for a new account with this app, and have it connect with our other application.

Figure 1.4: http://screencast.com/t/MGU5MTczY

Now I bet you are going, “oh shit now that is sick!” - Well maybe not, but I am. I’m pretty excited for the future of this idea. I think it has great potential, and I think when we do finally get to this point, we’ll have the perfect platform for it to exist, grow, and make for a great experience.

So that pretty much sums up BattleID and it’s future. Next week we’ll make the process easier (One page, instead of 3) and make it seamless to sign up. If you were hesitate to sign up, I hope this has shed some light on the confusion.

Talk to us about this post on Twitter

Improvements to Battle Center

We’ve been working to fix any bugs or to improve overall user experience on the application since it launched based mostly on feedback.

We just pushed a week’s worth of bug fixes and improvements a few minutes ago, and this post will just highlight a few of the more significant ones.

• Fixed an issue with non-participants of tournaments to post new messages.

• Fixed an issue where co-hosts were duplicated as participants

• Fixed a style issue with winners of tournaments, we now give them a nice style that stands out. With a little confetti to spice it up. http://screencast.com/t/YzdkMTRk

• Fixed an issue with the logo being 283 pixels wide even if it was only 100 pixels wide (Stretching).

• We now force subdomains (anythinghere.tbblive.com) to be lowercase, which caused some 404 page errors for people.

• Also force lowercase on BattleID’s

This was all within the first week of launch.

We call this a “Sprint”. We use a simplified method of “SCRUM” to structure our development progress - http://bit.ly/aMYrQz - For those so inclined.

Some of the things we’ll be working on this week:

• We’re in the process of cleaning up the participants code and re-integrating Teams. We took teams out so that we could launch sooner. Teams functionality should be live later this week.

• Email Notifications - This ranges from things like when someone posts a message, to when you receive an invite to a team. We have about 10 different scenerios where an email notification will be sent.

• We’ll be streamlining the sign-up process (requiring only one screen instead of 3) and the upgrade process (the form for billing info is quite terrible).

• We’ll be changing the Plans up a bit also. Changing up the name “Noob” to “Casual” - In hindsight it appeared a bit too negative. We’ll also be making significant updates to the number of tournaments you can host across all plans, and also the max number of participants.

• We’ll be working on a discount & affiliates program over the next couple of weeks.

So that about sums up all that we have done (last week) and what we plan on at least touching if not finishing this week. If you have any questions or have any suggestions please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We don’t sleep. http://support.thebattlebegins.com - hit us up anytime. We’re listening.

How it all started…

Whenever I tell people how TBB got to where it is today, they always seem very interested, so I figured that I would post it for everyone to see.

I’m going to have to go back about 2 years to where it all started. In 2007 I was trading Future E-mini’s on the S&P 500. After a couple months of doing this I realized that I really didn’t enjoy staring at graphs and charts all day. I wished that there was a more fun way to earn cash doing something, and that’s when I had my “Aha” moment. I came up with a concept to build a website that would allow people to play games against one another for cash.

With the concept in hand, I went to GoDaddy.com and started running through any URL’s that I thought would be fitting for the business. I cant remember what URL’s I came up with, but when I typed in thebattlebegins.com and it was free, I was shocked. I was almost 100% certain that it would have been bought up by some movie company (some alien vs earth or evil versus good movie), or some political campaign website. This was actually my first time ever buying a domain as I had never owned a web business before. I was actually hesitant to spend the $9.99 to buy the domain because I wasn’t sure if it was going to be worth it (Quick tip: If you find a domain you like, just buy it. They are so cheap and you never know if someone will buy it from or conceive a concept the fits the name.  Google GoDaddy coupons for some good deals!). I remember asking my brother if I should buy it. I ran the concept by him really quick, he didn’t really have much to say, but I bought it anyway.

The next couple of months I would learn a very important lesson. NEVER, EVER, EVER contract out work to a web design and development firm (Don’t crucify me yet… read on). If you need a quick website done to show off a few products you offer, or a simple e-commerce site, a web firm works fine. If you are building new web software, then avoid web firms at all cost. You might think that it would be cheaper than hiring a full time employee, but it is not. I’ll get more into this in a future post, but long story short, I over paid once for a site that never got finished (they screwed me over), then I overpaid again for a site that wasn’t necessarily bad, but because it was a contract job.  When the site was done, so was the support and future of the business.  Web software needs constant support.  I will be tweaked over time to fit how customers actually interact with it. Everything that is designed before a customer interacts with it is simply you assuming how customers will interact with it.  Back to the story…

The first launch of The Battle Begins was in 2008 with the concept of cash gaming. We were live for about 4 months, launching in November. This version of the site featured a flash application that was similar to Battle.Net. It allowed users to /whisper each other and join “Battles” where they could arrange their cash games. It also featured something called Battle Points which was points that users could gain over time by participating on the website to redeem prizes. The business model was to generate revenue based on advertisements. After running the website for 4 months and massing about 2,000 registered users, we decided that the site simply wasn’t going in the direction we wanted. The business model was flawed, and the application wasn’t built right.

It was a bit disappointing to shut down the site so early, but we had brought on a new partner, Matt Johnson, and had much bigger plans this time around. I met Matt through the old site, which is pretty much all the good that came out of building that site. We started chatting on the site and when I found out that he worked at WeGame (at the time) I got really intrigued. I never thought I would find someone as motivated as Matt. The day I met him, we set up a Skype meeting and he was pretty much instantly down to join of the team. It didn’t start as fast as it could have because my company was in talks with another company at the time, but the company wouldn’t be what it is today without Matt.

Matt later introduced me to a book called Getting Real and a company called 37Signals. When I read the book and took a closer look at 37Signals business model, I was floored. It made so much sense and it worked so well that I look back on my old site now and all that pops up in my head is “What was I thinking?!”.

We decided that we didn’t want to just be a gaming community, we wanted to be a software company and sell web-based applications to gamers. The first application we decided to make was a tournament application. Tournaments were our first priority because the old website ran 4 tournaments. These 4 tournaments brought the most traffic to our website, and engaged our users on a level that no feature built into our site had. Hosting the tournaments however was a headache. Players didn’t show up, we had to design a bracket (which cost $300, including CSS/HTML), players registered through a forum post, etc. Needless to say, it wasn’t as organized as it could be, but we also had to do everything from scratch. This prompted us to create a much more simple way to host tournaments, thus Battle Center was born.

Battle Center took us about 6 months to launch. The first thing we did once we conceptualized Battle Center was start designs and look for a developer. That’s where Bryan’s story at The Battle Begins starts. Matt introduced me to Bryan as an extremely capable developer who hadn’t been discovered. As with Matt, we Skype’d up that day, and the next day Bryan was developing. This may or may not have been poor choice. On one hand, we look back and think we should have planned a little more, but on the other hand, we see how much we’ve learned because of the mistakes we’ve made. It was the first time our Matt and Bryan had ever worked on such a big project. There were definitely a lot of things we hadn’t anticipated for, and looking back, we probably could have launched this app 2-3 months sooner if we had the knowledge we do now.

Here we are, roughly a week or so into launch with a new partner Leon Gaban as our community manager. Time to build the future, care to join us?

Beginning the Battle

Hello there, I’m Leon Gaban otherwise known as Lipton of Starfeeder.

Today I’m proud to say I’m a part of The Battle Begins team and their vision of supporting and enriching the gaming community at large with their gaming related apps.

I’ve ran very competitive and high-profile tournaments in the past. As one of my major roles here is to showcase our apps in action, I will be hosting, promoting and covering many exciting tournaments to come, be they competitive games from the past, or even games that are in beta ;)

My love for competitive gaming is the reason. As a tournament host I’ve experienced many headaches every time I’ve run one, and the Battle Center tournament management web app is the best thing since slice bread (or the laser mouse), when it comes to organizing and hosting a competitive gaming tournament. If you haven’t seen the tour check it out now, from automated brackets to intuitive participant management and a simple and easy to track communication system, running tournaments will now be a breeze.

On Starfeeder, I will continue to cover very specific topics about Starcraft 2. However here at The Battle Begins, I will be writing on a wider range of gaming news, topics and give my opinion on the state of the gaming industry and eSports.

So a little bit more about myself

The first game that gave me a competitive rush was Warcraft II, however once Starcraft was released it took my experience of competitive gaming to a whole another level. Watching the global eSports scene evolve was an enlightening moment as I realized the direction that competitive gaming was going, a future with a mainstream digital sports industry. I feel it’s still very much in its infancy and I’ll be covering a lot about its continued growth here on this blog.

Don’t forget to follow @TheBattleBegins on Twitter!

Welcome, let the Battles Begin…

Finally Launched! (Stealth?)

Its been a while coming, longer than we had anticipated, but the app is finally launched!

Its not perfect yet, and we are constantly working to make it better, but now that it is live, we can finally get some real usage out of Battle Center!  If you don’t know what Battle Center is, its a tournament management tool that lets you either host and manage a tournament or participate in someone else’s tournament.  If you want to learn more, check out www.thebattlecenter.com

Now I’ll explain the “Stealth” part in the title.  We opted out of doing a huge promotional launch for a smaller steady launch.  This means that we will slowly start telling those close to us who want to try it, and once we get some initial feedback, we will start publicly promoting more often.  We figured that instead of building more of the app without feedback from the community, we would rather get real usage out of the app and real feedback.  This will allow us to start improving the app in ways it is actually used instead of ways we think it will be used.  Bear with us while we work to improve Battle Center.  If you want to help us do it, sign up and send us feedback.  To submit feedback or report a bug, there is a feedback button in the application.  You can also always use this link: http://support.thebattlebegins.com/

Be sure to check back to this blog to hear about new updates and features as well as the app to see the changes for yourself!