The Start of Reaper's Brawlout
Reaper's Brawlout ran from September 2020 - February 2021. During this time I was an avid player on Brawlhalla, accumulating around 600 hours in the matter of a few months. I had a lot of fun with the game and live streaming it to my community playing King of the Hill lobbies in which I would cast over the players if I myself was not playing. After playing the game for a while and reaching a rank considered above average, I thought I would attempt to take on online tournaments.
When it came to competing and looking for these tournaments, most of these were being played on North American servers, meaning it was a challenge to play on a high ping. The only well known running tournament/ league for the European side of Brawlhalla other than the official tournaments, was called Brawl League which were only monthly.
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Wanting to see more recognition and have more tournaments on the European servers, the idea of Reaper's Brawlout was created.
Above shows a showcase of all graphics made.
How it grew
At the start of Reaper's Brawlout, as everything, it started off quite slowly. As I was still only a college student with a part time job. It was hard to give incentives for players to participate in the first place. However thanks to support of my community we was able to gather enough numbers to run the early instalments of the tournament.
From the start of running these tournaments I was able to network with fellow tournament organisers which further lead to connecting with Brawlhalla's community tournament managers in which they helped support my tournaments by funding the tournaments with cash prizes which they would take care about paying the players, as well as the tournaments being featured in the games Esports tab. After this the tournaments began to skyrocket in players, almost quadrupling in participants compared to the final tournament before being part of the community support program.
By clicking on the link here you will be able to see the League on Start.gg that held all 9 tournaments
Maintaining the Growth
Following the big spike in participants and community members following the support from Brawlhalla team. Running a tournament with hundred of participants every tournament, I knew it was important to build on the momentum. From my networking I was able to access tools that was able to help out when it came to seeding players, something that would've taken hours cut down a lot. With this spare time from seeding I used this to promote the tournament more.
I created a Twitter account for the tournaments where I would feature clips from older tournaments to build up more hype for the future tournaments as well as interact with the players as well. I also took the time to create new and refine some graphics as well as looking into short cuts to help make the broadcasts look a lot smoother.
During this time I also looked at the official Brawlhalla tournaments to see how else I could expand on the tournaments, from my research I started to post the clips of the final matches of each tournament, this was to allow for the players to work on improving on themselves.
Also during this time as my tournament production and the number of attendants were improving, a member of staff from Start.gg reached out to me about having their feature in production, the fantasy feature. This feature allowed players to build a fantasy team with a budget and players having a price depending on seeding. With the top 3 participants earning a prize funded by Start.gg.
After all of this the tournaments continued to grow, peaking at 267 player and across 11 tournaments having over 1100 unique participants.
I ended the tournaments due to burnout and planned on continuing them at a later date, however due to other responsibilities I didn't have the time to continue it and hasn't come back since.
