Hello again!

With December already here I have received a lot of questions about the New Eden Open. Will there be another one? When will it happen? How big will the prize pool be? Well capsuleers, ask no more! I am here to give you the answers!

For those that don't know what the New Eden Open is, it is an EVE Online tournament featuring real life cash prizes held by CCP. So if you are interested in some serious spacefighting business then open those eyes and keep reading!

I am happy to announce that we will have a second New Eden Open, and it is going to be even bigger than the first one! We are also making some changes to the tournament based on the lessons we learned last year. So without further ado, let‘s go over the changes and dates for the second New Eden Open.

Oh.. Sorry.. I almost forgot, the prize pool this time around will be $25,000! The payout structure will be as follows:

1st place: $ 12,000

2nd place: $ 8,000

3rd place: $5,000

Now for the changes. We are reducing the maximum team size from 24 characters down to 12 characters. We are doing this to make the prize payouts more meaningful as well as to put the competitors in a place where they need to adapt to bans in a different way. We also think that this will encourage teams to have more practice matches against each other and hopefully stimulate a more healthy competitive environment around tournaments.

The other big change is obviously the dates of the tournament. Last year the tournament conflicted with some holidays and made it difficult for some to watch and compete. When we were looking at doing this year‘s New Eden Open we were faced with similar challenges when navigating expansions and holidays. We thought it would be better to move the tournament to a more convenient time, and find a permanent home for it in the schedule for the year.

The number of teams in the tournament will be unchanged at 32 teams but only 28 slots will be up for the silent auction. One of the extra slots will go to last year‘s winner Asine Hitama‘s Team (should they choose to accept it) and the rest of the slots will be dispensed through a raffle that will occur after the silent auction finishes.

The final rules for the tournament this year are being worked on, but I can tell you that we are looking in to how to deal with Bastion Mode Marauders, and how to balance tinker and sentry drone setups in a way that will encourage fun counterplay and new strategies.

But on to the dates! (now updated)

7th of January: Signups open

20th of January: Signups close at downtime and the number of teams are announced. Silent auction starts.

23rd of January: Silent auction ends at 23:59:59 UTC.

24th of January: Winners of the silent auction announced and final list of teams published, including the raffled teams.

1st of March: First weekend starts.

8th of March: Second weekend starts.

15th of March: Third and final weekend starts.

Finally I wanted to quickly address the issues with payment that occurred with last years winners. It is no secret that paying out the prizes is something that has taken longer than it should. The original arrangement was that our partner at the time was supposed to handle payments of the prizes. When they closed down their service we stepped in to deliver the promised prizes without any prior experience of paying out prizes like this. This resulted in us learning multiple lessons and streamlining our processes.

That is all I have for now but keep your eyes open for more dev blogs about the NEO in the coming days.

-CCP Bro

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