To get right to the point, the highly anticipated automated tournament system on steemmonsters.com is unfortunately not going to be finished right at the end of January. Our crystal ball didn't work accurately this time. A whole bunch of unexpected things have come up over the last month or so which has caused us to fall behind schedule.

That being said, they will definitely be out in Q1 of this year, and very likely in February, barring @yabapmatt getting hit by a bus. In the rest of this post we would like to update the community on the current development progress as well as align expectations on what we plan to release for the first version and going forward.

Current Progress

As of the time of posting, all of the back-end work for creating and running an automated tournament on the blockchain has been completed. We have set up a bunch of bot accounts on our development environment and had them all play through a full tournament, complete with entry fees and prize payouts.

The work that is still remaining is to implement the user interface within the website. The design of the initial interface is mostly completed, thanks to @nateaguila, and we will be working to implement Nate's designs and wire everything up as quickly as humanly possible.

Once that is done, we will put it up on our test server and invite some of the Monster Mavericks and other community members to test out some tournaments there, allow some time for bug fixes and changes, and then release it to steemmonsters.com once it's ready.

Initial Feature Set

For the initial release of the automated tournament system, we expect to have support for the following features:

1. Basic single-elimination format, including a "qualifier" round to get the players to an even power of 2 (similar to how it's handled on challonge.com).
2. Ability to specify "best of N" for each round where N can be 1, 3, 5, or 7.
3. Option to specify a minimum number of entrants required for the tournament to take place, and a max entrants cap.
4. Ability to provide sponsor information and logo image which will be shown throughout the tournament interface.
5. Option to require entry fees in the form of STEEM, SBD, and Beta edition booster packs.
6. Support for automatic, fully customizeable prize payouts in STEEM, SBD, and Beta edition booster packs, as well as an option to specify custom prizes handled outside of the Steem blockchain.

Once those features are up and running and working well we will immediately begin working on adding more features on a regular basis, including support for more formats (round-robin, swiss, etc), support for private, invite-only tournaments, and anything else that the community would like to have.

We are always open to ideas and suggestions, so please feel free to let us know what you want to see added! Again, sorry for the minor delay, but when it launches we expect this community will be stoked!

Thank you for your continued support!

Steem Monsters Contact Info:

@steemmonsters

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