24 Jan 2017, 22:49

New Year's Invitational Finals

ESOC 2v2 Invitational

ESOC Spring Championships 2017 Signups

Badges for donators, casters, and tournament winners

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Hey guys!While the New Year's Invitational has advanced onto the RO8, we at ESOC are already preparing for the rest of the year. The finals of the New Year's Invitational will be played on February 11th, and as some as you might have already noticed ESOC will be turning 2 years old on February 11th! This date will be marked by a ton of fancy stuff, namely..A full schedule for February 11th will be released shortly!We have invited 16 top level team players to play in the ESOC 2v2 Invitational. Players will play a BO3 in the first round and a BO5 in the last two rounds. The civilization rules will be the same as in our seasonal 1v1 tournaments: free pick on first map, alternating picks after that. The players will fight for the prize pool of $200. The team in first place will take $150 while the team in second place will take the rest. We hope for a fun event for both players and spectators! A news post with more details about this event will be released shortly.The ESOC Media Team has worked on reforming our tournaments in the past few months. Throughout all of the Christmas holidays and Jerom's midlife crisis,we realized that forcing players to play on all maps might not be the style that we should be going for, especially since new maps keep getting released.After considering a lot of options, we have decided to work with a (map) veto system during the next tournament. Additionally, the map pool for each round will be released along with the signups to allow players to study their upcoming map pool in advance.The group stages that we all know andhate will also be changed slightly. To combat the problem where a group could turn into a three-way tie if a player failed to play all of their matches, we will be toying with the size of groups, seeding, and other things. Another complaint from high leveled players was that they felt like they couldn't play enough games after their preseed before getting knocked out in the later stages, so we will also look into pre seeding more carefully.The semi finals of the New Year's Invitational will be played next week(end). I hope to see you all there! Thanks to Tilanus for making this amazing bracket for the 2v2 invitational.