Hey everyone!

We know you’re all itching for more information on Battlerite and Battlerite Royale, and we will have more information for you on those subjects soon. But for today we’re going to be going over another large aspect of Battlerite – the Battlerite Pro League.

Our competitive scene is important to us, and now that we’ve taken in and discussed feedback from the community we’re ready to announce when BPL Season 2 begins and the changes that will be happening from Season 1 to Season 2.

Battlerite Pro League Season 2

The BPL Season 2 Group Stage will begin on August 11th or 12th depending on region, and just like BPL Season 1 there will be action every weekend for six weeks straight. The schedule will be as follows:

Date Event August 8 Group Draws August 11-12 Group Stage August 18-19 Group Stage August 25-26 Group Stage + Tiebreakers September 1-2 Playoffs September 8-9 Finals September 15-16 Relegation and Promotion Matches

As you can obviously see – there will be no Global Finals for BPL Season 2. This was always planned and referenced in the BPL Format video. This season we want to focus on improving the content and accessibility of information. VODS will be uploaded to the Battlerite Esports YouTube regularly, updates will be done to both BPL.gg and predict.bpl.gg, and we are looking in to having more content produced. We know that this aspect was disappointing to the community during Season 1, and are taking the steps to improve.

As was last season, both North America and Europe will be streamed on twitch.tv/battlerite.

BPL NA will be streamed on Saturdays and begin at 12:00 PT

BPL EU will be streamed on Sundays and begin at 18:00 CEST

BPL South America will be streamed on twitch.tv/battleritesa on Sundays at 19:00 BRT.

Champion Draft and Bans

Throughout BPL Season 1 we had the community and players discuss how teams draft Champions. Bans were considered for Season 1, but we wanted to see how the competitive scene would play out initially without bans. We also wanted to assure that players had enough time to prepare to the changes to drafting. After internal discussion, we will be making changes to how team will draft in our league.

These changes will NOT affect how drafting currently works in game in League.

Teams will perform actions simultaneously and picks and bans will be revealed together as before. For Season 2 the draft will be as follows:

Ban

Pick

Pick

Ban

Pick

It is important to note here than bans will only affect the opposing teams. Meaning that if Team A bans Shifu, they still have the option of choosing Shifu unless Team B bans Shifu as well.

As we saw at DreamHack Summer 2018, the current meta in the competitive scene is healthy even without bans but we believe that bans will help in other situations. We also wanted to give teams more control over the Champion draft. This adds a layer of strategy in which teams can ban Champions to prevent them from being played by particular players or to ‘break’ a composition that the opposing team is trying to construct.

We will continue to monitor the effect of bans on the competitive scene, and look forward to hearing feedback from both the BPL competitors and Battlerite community.

Team Rosters and Open Qualifiers

The BPL Ruleset requests that teams retain at least 2 members from one season to the next. Teams will need to lock their rosters by July 25th and those that fail to do so will lose their placement in Season 2.

If a vacancy occurs, we will hold an Open Qualifier on August 4th or 5th to replace the empty spot. We will announce further information on this if necessary.

Rising Stars

Rising Stars is back along with Season 2, and the first week will take part on the weekend of August 18-19 and we will hold three events and a playoffs. Like Season 1, Rising Stars will not be streamed and participants have a chance to advance to BPL Season 3!

Click here for rules and to register your Rising Stars team.

That’s all for this Dev Update! Like I mentioned at the beginning, we have another Dev Update scheduled on Battlerite the game. The point of Dev Updates is to have a place to display important information, a place where we need to go into depth about changes that are occurring at the thought behind them, and a place where that important information is displayed in a single location.

We hope you’re looking forward to BPL Season 2 as much as we are!

Until next time, see you in the Arena!

/Liz