The Halo Championship Series (HCS) is back for its second iteration! After the amazing matches during HCS Season 1 and Evil Geniuses’ thrilling victory in the finals at PAX East, Season 2 promises to be even better.



Season 2 will feature a revamped tournament structure along with an all-new point system and restructured roster change rules. Take a look!

Schedule



Click to enlarge



As seen in the graphic above, HCS Season 2 will include two preseason cups in order to allow teams to properly get into the swing of things. They will also provide us with the chance to test out potential new maps, but we’ll go into more detail about this later on.



The online cups running throughout the season will pay out US$3,000 each weekend, up from US$1,000 in previous seasons, and will feature eight open bracket teams and eight pre-qualified teams each week. The tournament structure is as follows:



Open bracket

Saturdays at 11:00 PST (20:00 CET)

Playing through the round of 16, with the winners of the round of 16 advancing into the legendary bracket

Single elimination, best of three

Legendary bracket

Sundays at 13:00 PST (22:00 CET)

16 teams (eight pre-qualified teams, eight from open bracket]

Top eight by standings pre-qualified for the legendary bracket every week

Single elimination, best of five

If you think your team has what it takes, just sign up to the open bracket for your chance to go all the way to the season two finals.

After registering your team, you’ll also be eligible to take part in the preseason cups. Simply sign your team up right here to prepare yourself for regular season:

Point breakdown

To promote an active top eight with more movement, we decided to change up the point distribution. One of the key aims of this is to reward teams for giving consistent performances. Furthermore, we opted to remove tiers in the LAN tournaments during seasons. Check out the full point breakdown in the graphic below.





Click to enlarge

Roster rule changes

In addition to the above, we made the following changes to the roster ruleset to ensure stability within the teams throughout the HCS:

Majority rule - teams need to retain at least three players in order to retain points

Players can be dropped at any time but can only be added during the transfer period

Three transfer periods

New maps

Furthermore, we are considering a number of maps for HCS Season 2, which will be tested during the second preseason cup. Check out the new maps and their game types below:



Eden by Obi Wai Kenobi

Team Slayer, Team Crazy King, Team Ball

Athelon by WARH0LIC

Team Slayer, Capture the Flag, Multibomb Assault, Ricochet, Neutral Bomb Assault

Epicborough by a Chunk

Team Slayer, Capture the Flag, Ricochet

Temple by SHIFTY time

Team Slayer, Capture the Flag, Ricochet, Neutral Bomb Assault

Erupt by Saltykoalabear and purely fat

Capture the Flag, Multibomb Assault, Ricochet

Tesla by Diesel

Team Slayer, Neutral Bomb Assault, Capture the Flag

Venom by The Fated Fire

Team Slayer, King of the Hill, Oddball

To download these maps and potential new game type candidate Ricochet, players can add Official HCS to their friends list on Xbox Live, access the Official HCS file share and download them.





Season 2 finals

You don’t want to miss out on the epic conclusion to HCS Season 2, which will pay out a whopping US$150,000 to its participants.

When? July the 24th to the 26th 2015

July the 24th to the 26th 2015 Where? The ESL studios in Burbank, California

The ESL studios in Burbank, California Prize pool: US$150,000

Further details regarding HCS Season 2 will be revealed a little way down the road, so don’t forget to follow @ESLHalo and the ESL Halo Facebook page to keep up to date with the latest Halo news.

Share this article: