Sibe

Faceit left the Russian market, and with it went the way to play a match by the rules. Sibe puts that back: scrims, tournaments, and match lobbies with map and server bans. I ran the research, designed the core flow, and shaped the concept.

Faceit ушёл с российского рынка, и вместе с ним ушёл способ сыграть матч по правилам. Sibe собирает это заново: скримы, турниры и матчевые лобби с баном карт и серверов. Я провёл аналитику, спроектировал основной сценарий и собрал концепцию.

Playing by the rules got hard

A match by the rules needs a bracket, map bans and a recorded result. Faceit gave players that, and its leaving took it away. Sibe rebuilds it — for players, and for organisations that run tournaments under their own name.

The second audience is what makes it a platform. An organiser is not a guest here: they buy a tournament, or the whole organisation, and run events under their own name — their tournaments, their branding, their audience. The design had to work for both, a player who wants to be in a match in two minutes and an organiser assembling an event for a hundred teams.

What was mine

What had already been figured out

I took the category apart. Not the obvious competitors so much as the services that have been running tournaments for a decade and more. Their interfaces look dated and their mechanics are worn smooth — a thousand tournaments took the wrong ones away.

How a tournament gets from an idea to a filled bracket, and who does what at each step.
What a lobby must do before a match starts, and what it must never ask twice.
Which bracket formats people actually use, as opposed to the ones a system supports on paper.
Where the old services still win, and where habit is the only thing holding them up.

What came out of it was a handful of decisions.

Everything moves down one funnel

The whole product is a single chain, and every screen sits somewhere on it. That became the governing thought: if you can say which link you are on, you can say what the screen is for.

The lobby

When a match starts, a lobby opens for both teams. Everyone confirms they are ready, and the main roster goes in.

Ban and pick maps, one team at a time.
Ban and pick the server, so nobody plays on someone else’s ping.
Ban and pick the starting side.
A chat, because every one of those steps is an argument waiting to happen.

Teams and roles

A team has a captain, often a coach, sometimes a manager, and the players themselves — a main roster and a bench. Each has a different reason to open the app, so each gets a different set of controls. One screen with half the buttons greyed out does not do the job.

The avatar and what sits behind it

Every player gets an avatar and, behind it, a second layer they can customise: a backing plate rendered with shaders, so it moves. It is the one part of the product that is there to be wanted. In competitive gaming that pays off — the profile is what a player shows people.

Offline tournaments

Sibe also runs offline tournaments, and I made the graphics for a number of them: banners, mailings, artwork. Work off to the side of the product, but the part people saw first.

An MVP, and what would prove it

It is at MVP now, and the team goes out to look for partners very soon. After that: sponsors, and the international stage. Big plans, but the team has deep connections across esports, so there is something to build them on.

The weak spot of this case is the result, and I would rather say so than dress it up. Nothing has reached users yet, so there are no numbers. What will prove it is behaviour, not screens: how many teams get from registering to a match actually played, and how many organisers run a second tournament after their first.