Hey everyone! I hope you all had a great holiday season and are all set for a great year of eSports in 2012! In the spirit of the day, since the IPL crew is about to go back to work, I felt like I should make a post regarding the new year and what we're going to be doing going forward both to improve our existing plans and creating new plans. One small note is this is all written from my perspective and things are subject to change as always.



1) It is absolutely amazing to me how far we've come in one year. The IPL has only been around publicly for 8 months or so, and if you had told me in April we would be throwing a major live event in October, I would have told you that you were crazy. Heck, I was working for ROOT Gaming at night while working at a law firm during the day at this time last year and had not even been contacted about working for IGN. We could only accomplish what we did last year with the the enormous support of the community and IGN as a whole. Thank you so much everyone for enabling us to work in eSports!



2) We've gone through a lot of different content and ideas in the past year. Thank you for putting up with the stuff you didn't like as much and continuing to give us feedback on everything positive and negative. You all have contributed significantly to how every major program at the IPL has developed and I cannot say enough how much your feedback means to us. Everyone at the IPL reads your feedback - ops, video, engineering, etc. Please continue to give us feedback in 2012!



3) Fight Club and Team Arena are here to stay. I love these programs as a fan and I think they are great programs to inject cash to teams and players. We loved your response to the next 'version' of Team Arena, the Team Arena Challenge, and we scrapped our plans for January in favor of creating TAC 2 as soon as possible. TAC 2 will be 16 teams in a double elimination bracket fighting for a $20,000 prize pool! Not every spot will be invited teams, but most will be - we're looking at around 4 open spots. We will be releasing more information on how to qualify for those last 4 spots within a couple days and expect the qualifier event to start shortly after.



After TAC 2 ends, we will start normal Team Arena back up. Fight Club will continue to run during TAC 2.



4) We aim to create new content during this upcoming year. Some of it will be re-imaginings of things in the past and we also have some ideas for new types of events. I don't want to say anything and get you excited only to disappoint if it doesn't go through, so I'll just say I hope you look forward to our content this year and help us out by giving us feedback on it so we can make it better over time!



5) Rebroadcasts. We are aware this has been a contentious subject. We have received a lot of feedback both ways and we've been working on improving this system. The dilemma is that we know that the rebroadcasts offer a lot of value to people on the west coast and for our fans elsewhere in the world but we don't want to frustrate people who might tune in expecting it to be fresh content. We sat down with the TL heads a bit ago and we have a new system for how we handle rebroadcasts. The system we've worked out is that we'll continue to be using our big red 'Rebroadcast' message on the stream when it goes to a rebroadcast. Also, we will delist our stream from the event and have it just fall under "Others" on the stream list. We are working hard to make sure we do this as quickly as possible - I'm not saying it will be the exact second it switches over, but we consider this to be a priority and will work hard to make it a fast process. In addition, we have a great group of volunteer mods and our own broadcast producers in chat to answer questions if anything is unclear. If you have further constructive advice please let us know!



6) Live Events. The only thing I can actually say right now is this is being worked on aggressively and we've made a lot of progress, but I cannot give hard dates and locations yet.



7) One last note is that I want to thank our fantastic crew of volunteer workers at IPL 3. Pretty much all of them came from the TL/Reddit community, even if they were lurkers. They represent what is awesome about this community.



To sum up, the IPL's New Year Resolution is to continue improving our existing products while crafting new awesome products with the support of the community.



In closing, thank you all for a great year and I look forward to a great new year of eSports with everyone! If you have any questions or comments please feel free to post them!