TLDR: gankster is a platform for competitive teams and players where you can find and post scrims, form teams (LFP/LFT), and connect with other teams. All while we’re taking care of the annoying stuff - scrim match data, communication (built-in scrim chat), reliability (reputation system), time zones, notifications (updates straight into your discord DMs) and more.

You can check it out at https://gankster.gg (it’s free)

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Hi everyone! My name is Dan, and I’m one of the developers behind gankster - the competitive gaming platform built by 5 friends during the past year (quarantine has it’s positives).

We launched gankster for League of Legends in late August, and it grew beyond our expectations since; over 10k pros, amatuers, collegiate and aspiring LoL teams and players are using gankster, and have posted more than 20,000 scrims. gankster is now the go-to destination for League teams to find scrims. But don’t just take our words for it, we got some tweets to show for.

Now, after a short closed beta of our new Valorant version, we feel it's time to open our project for everyone and share with you our dedicated Valorant version of gankster. We hope you can share your thoughts and feedback.

Why we built gankster

Before we set out to build what eventually would become gankster we researched and talked to pro and semi-pro team managers from LoL, Dota and CSGO, asked them about what’s missing and what tools we can build to make their life easier.

I'm sure a lot of you can relate to some of our research findings:

• You have to jump around multiple platforms to find scrims (discord, fb, whatsapp, some teams are even using skype!?) .
• You have very little information about your opponent who often cancels at the last minute or doesn't show up to scrims at all.
• Takes a lot of time to find teammates who are a good fit.
• Once you finally formed a team, you’ll have to search countless platforms for a tournament or league to play in.
• Keeping everyone on your team up to date on your scrim activity and schedule is manual work. Calculating time zones is especially a pain in the ass.

Our mindset was to take everything that’s happening over countless discord servers or other chat platforms and google sheets/calendar, put it into a functional interface that is built specifically for competitive gamers and integrate it with the tools you are already using.

Eventually, we hope gankster will help make the competitive gaming scene more approachable by defining and organizing ways to improve outside and inside the game. Our goal is to make esports accessible to larger crowds so that more people will be able to compete - whether you want to become a pro or just want to play competitively (or you’re addicted. No shame in that).

Here’s what you can actually do on gankster

Find quality scrims

Our open scrim system helps you discover and play with teams your level. Instead of scattering around countless discord servers, post your LFS (Looking For Scrim), or send requests to other teams’ LFS. You can see their rank, server and roster in a glance. Our Riot API integration verifies every team's roster, so you know exactly who you’re playing against, including each player’s stats from their recent matches.

You can also choose which timezone you want to work with - and we’ll take care of displaying the correct time to your opponent, according to their choice.

Scrims page and team info tooltip

Discord Integration

If you login with discord or connect it to your account, our bot will send you activity updates via DMs. Users are saying this is one of our best features and is the main reason almost 90% of scrim requests are answered. You’ll never miss a scrim request and confirmation.

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the gankster bot will notify you on important activity

Reputation

After the scrim, you’ll have a chance to contribute to the community's reputation system. Give your opponent +rep if everything went smooth, or report them for not showing up or canceling at the last minute. You can see a team’s reputation by the badge next to their logo.

Built-in Chat

We built a chat system so you can keep communication close to where you schedule scrims and recruit players.

When you send or receive a scrim request a chat box will automatically open where you can communicate with your opponent. Same goes for the recruiting process.

Find a team and recruit players

LFT/LFP (Looking For Team/Player), a dedicated place for teams to find their missing piece of the puzzle, and for individuals to find a group that matches their skills and ambitions, whether you’re aiming for the VCT or for weekend fun.

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LFP Page

You’ll have a consistent way to view player/team data (again, utilizing our Riot API integration for player data) and ability to filter according to your needs (rank, server, roles etc..).

LFT Page Screenshot

Connect with teams you scrim with often

One of gankster’s core aspects is the ability for your team to create its own competitive network and share your schedule between you and your connections. Had a good time playing a recent opponent? Connect with them and always get a view of their scrim schedule so you can play them again.

Connections page screenshot

gankster for pro teams

gankster is actively used by many pro and semi-pro teams from Dota’s DPC, LCS Proving Grounds, and various ERL tiers, such as EG Prodigies, 100 Thieves Next, Wildcard Gaming, Immortals AOE, Team Undying (now TSM), Infamous and more.

gankster for Discord communities & scrim servers

Our Discord integration helps communities bring the structure of gankster directly to their discord server. We sync gankster scrims to your own channels, according to your rules, in a consistent neatly format. Several League and Dota communities are already using it and the responses are amazing from both the server admins and users.If you’re part of such a community, we’d be happy to talk and help you make it even better.

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Automatic scrims from gankster to your Discord

Find and promote tournaments & leagues

As we grew, a lot of tournament organizers (TOs) reached out to us aiming to promote their tournaments to the gankster crowd. We recently started collaborating with several League TOs and plan to do so right from the get-go with Valorant. If you're a TO who wishes to use our platform to increase your tournament reach, let's talk.

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Tournament promotion in gankster

Valorant integrations - scrim match data

We’re working on a dedicated Valorant integration to automatically bring data from your scrims into gankster, where you can filter and analyze your team’s stats.

We're very keen to know what kind of data you are interested in. Feel free to let us know here or via the contact methods below.

Who's behind this?

We are a team of 5 life long gamers and friends who started gankster as a side project in between quarantines. Once we saw the community's response we all quit our tech jobs and decided to fully commit into helping the esports industry reach its potential. gankster is completely bootstrapped. Special shout-out to our wonderful volunteers who joined along the way and helped us get this far.

One last thing

If you survived this long then you’re probably the right person to hear this - gankster is built on research and feedback and we intend to keep working this way. We know the only way to succeed is to build what solves our community’s pains, so please - tell us where it hurts.

Wanna talk?

If you like our vision, and think you can contribute in some way - like community outreach or feedback collection, or just have something to say, feel free to reach out to me.

You can find me on discord at ddyo#9254 OR email [email protected]

Join our 5k members discord server, where we announce feature updates and listen to your thoughts and feedback - https://discord.gg/PGdDDCTbKx

Follow us on twitter - https://www.twitter.com/gankstergg

Check out our website for a quick overview of gankster - https://gankster.gg