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Today, I have some unfortunate news to share 📃
TLDR: the ProTFT website will be shutdown, but all the data collected will be made public for anyone that wants to use it. For the why: In short, I don't have the time to keep working on it and it's only getting harder each set.
First of all, I'm really proud of how the site turned out after these ~2 years. I'm confident that we were the most complete database of results in competitive TFT for the last few sets, covering 250+ tournaments in 9 different regions. But this achievement also comes with a price.
A lot of people don't know that the bulk of the work in the website is still very manual. Let me summarize how it works (feel free to skip it if you don't really care about this part):
Step 0 - At the start of each set, I go through websites/discords of every region, translate their Rulebooks and create the tournaments in the website with their date, prize pool, # of players, stages, etc.
Step 1 - As we get to the date of the tournament, I search for the scoresheet, which is published in different places for each tournament. It could be in stream chats, websites, discord servers or literally nowhere so I have to ask players to send me directly or take screenshots of the stream.
Step 2 (the hardest one) - I need to get the list of players in the tournament and match with what I have on the database, to avoid duplicate profiles. I have some automations for this, but there's still manual work to check that, for example: poutsarou9666666666, GN TSAROU WINS, TSAROU WINS, Tsarou are all the same player. This gets exponentially harder for regions with different alphabets, like 🇨🇳 CN, 🇹🇼 TW, 🇰🇷KR and 🇯🇵 JP. I need to go through translations, OCR and check player profiles to understand that these are all the same player: bongdal, 분석왕봉달0|, 해설왕봉달이
Step 3 - Each region uses different spreadsheets and, a lot of times, different formats from tournament to tournament. So I copy all the data to my spreadsheets and convert it to a single output that I can import into the website. I did my best to have these "converter spreadsheets" ready to be reused, but with formats changing all the time and manual input errors, it's rare that they work flawlessly.
Step 4 - I create the tournament structure on ProTFT (number of stages, rounds, lobbies, # of players qualifying per stage...) and import the data from step 3. All the stats are automatically updated and you can see the data on the website.
This has to be done for each stage of each tournament (Day 1, Day 2...). When I started a couple of years ago, I thought this would get better with time. Maybe we'd get API's to fetch this data, or the circuit would get more compact, but none of it happened. As we moved to 3 sets a year, the competitive timeline got shorter, which meant tournaments every single weekend, with some weekends having more than 10!
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Now for the personal part, I (@lucas_heim) am the only person working on the website, including developing it, fixing bugs, updating tournament data, doing social media, marketing and paying for the costs.
I have a full-time job, a wife and two cats, and during the ProTFT lifetime I finished my CS graduation, changed jobs and moved across the ocean from Brazil to Germany. The website started as a hobby project for me as I wanted to contribute to the TFT community and grew to be a big part of my routine.
At the same time I'm really proud of it, ProTFT consumed a lot of my weekends. I wasn't able to keep many other hobbies or even play TFT and this has really hurt me as I'm in a new country with not that many friends. I want to live a healthier life and this is the main reason behind this decision.
If there was ever an opportunity to work on this full-time I'd jump on it, but unfortunately this is not the reality. I pay for all the infrastructure costs out of my pocket and as I was never able to monetize the website, it gets harder to justify the time investment. I had so many ideas and even started working on a new design, so I'm sad this will never see the light of day.
I want to thank everyone that consumed our content. Every single time I got a message I was really happy to see that people were actually using the website.
I need to extend a special thank you to some people in the community that helped me directly. Know that you made the work feel less lonely and more rewarding.
From NA, @LorenceTFT and @Boyses21 who believed in the project really early and provided good advice
From EMEA, @meeix_ and @ImpetuousPanda that really made me believe the website was useful
From LATAM, @PieHatPH for all the incredibly quick help dealing with ESL 😅 and for providing more info on the region
From BR, @muriloh07 and @Ziziziziie for many open-hearted conversations and help identifying duplicate players in the circuit
From TW, @ClementKChu for the continuous support and help with the SEA region
From CN, @CuewarsTaner who always does an incredible job. I wouldn't have 1% of the CN data if it wasn't for him and I hope to have been useful for you as well
From the producers/Riot side, I want to also thank @Pandala93 and @max_wish who took the time to sit down together and listen to the problems I had. Although we weren't able to work a lot together, I really appreciate it.
If I find the time, I still want to collaborate with the community in some ways, so maybe you'll still see me around.
Thank you,
Lucas
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