Tournaments incoming updates

Hey everyone happy sunday!

Big announcement incoming.

We got to experiment a lot with different tournament schedules these past seasons and after a lot of consideration, we got some direction on where we want to go and what the tournament landscape should look like.

The overall goal is to find perfect balance between having a packed action calendar and not burning out managers. As of right now there are too many competitions for top managers to prepare for and there's also too many prestigious trophies going around for people with just 1 season in the game.

So what we are going to do is remove the per tier majors and minors as they are right now, and instead we are going to keep a single big championship that will span throughout the whole season, in what we could call the "road to championship major".

Here is how that's going to work:

Stage 1 - B-Tiers

A free to join tournament for all B-Tiers to play very early in the season.
The top 32 teams advance to stage 2.

Stage 2 - A-Tiers + stage 1 winners

A free to join tournament for all A-Tiers to play very early in the season and the winners of stage 1.
The top 32 teams advance to stage 3.

Stage 3 - Main qualification

The 32 winners of stage 2 will play along the 16 lowest ranked S-Tier teams.
The 16 winners advance to the main event.

Main event

Prestigious major championship tournament with a total of 48 participating teams, including the top 32 S-Tier teams + the 16 winners from Stage 3.
Each phase will be played in its own day to give plenty of time for teams to prepare.
Finals played on the last week.

Then we'll have this additional competitions:

Minor tournament
The 32 teams who failed to qualify to the main event in Stage 3 will be playing a minor yet unique tournament in same schedule as the major.
Finals to be played on last week of the season as well.

Rookies cup
A free to join rookies cup will be available to play by all the teams in B-Tier and A-Tier. Except those that got to qualify for major/minor.

Invitational tournament
This is the current major/championship we have right now played at end of season, the qualification structure for this will remain the same but this tournament will be less prestigious with prizes and trophy reflecting that. This aligns with our idea that "weekend tournaments" shouldn't be as prestigious as long ones.

Open tournaments
Just like the ones we are having now, played every other day. So far seemed like a great addition.

So what this new system will allow is for the most prestigious competitions to be played throughout the season, while having the top teams focus only in important matches and keeping the early qualifications for the lower tier teams, which will have a fun experience trying to get to the top.

This also adds a big motivation to reach S-Tier to get to the championship easier. Which by the way we are reducing the minimum # of slots from 56 to 48.

As always reach out if you have any questions.

Patch Notes - 1.1.1

Highlights

Mostly small improvements to features released like the chat system.

I also revamped the media page with a much cleaner version along with a help section.

Also adding community roles and the ability to transfer founder powers, much needed.

Full list of changes

- Chat system improvements
- Revamped media page
- Small menu and header restructuring
- Community updated banner style to match the other banners
- Community roles
- Community news
- Small QoL improvements and mobile tweaks
- Pool party tac editor

This is already live

Upcoming academy changes

Hello everyone!

Have an announcement to make regarding upcoming academy changes for next season.

Tryout generation changes:

The first change is going to be about the tryout generation algorithm. We are going to reframe it by getting rid of the restrictive cooldown and we’ll set a “Scout quality” boost instead.

The way this is going to work is that everyone starts with the lowest scout quality value possible; as days go by you’ll see this number increasing along with the quality of the tryouts you get. So the more time you wait, the better tryouts you’ll receive.

So once you get a player you like you can accept it and every other tryout will be automatically rejected, and then your scout quality will reset.

With this system we are getting rid of the frustrating cooldown and we are giving control to the managers to either settle for an average tryout or keep waiting for something better. The min and max quality will remain the same as the current system, so it’s not like the quality will scale indefinitely, there’s a limit.

We’ll also set a “pity timer” so if the unlucky ones haven’t got any decent tryouts in X days, one will spawn for them.

2v2 competitions in new map:

We know just waiting for the rookies to grow gets a little boring, so we are throwing a very fun competition in there to be held weekly in a revamped mini‑map from beta.

Here’s how that is going to work:
- The map is “Pool Party”; anyone who played CS back in the day will recognise it immediately.
- The map is going to be 2v2, as such tactic creation will be limited to just 2 players.
- Another limitation in the tactic editor will be a max of 5 points rather than the classic 9.
- There’s gonna be 2 separate tiers/divisions, 16–17 yo and 18–19 yo.
- When registering to the event one will pick the 2 players from the academy that should sign up and meet the age criteria.
- The prize for this competition is simply a boost in fame for the rookies. We don’t want this event to feel mandatory but rather optional, while still giving a little something, and since some people were wishing for a way to farm rookies’ fame this is the perfect fit.

More news coming soon!

Patch Notes - 1.1.0

Highlights

First patch of the season, mainly focusing in the mobile experience which is long overdue. Including most of the site pages as well as the fully working tactic editor and a much better 2d viewer.

Additionally a UI improvement to the way trophies are displayed, with options to customize how many and which trophies to showcase.

A big one is the private messaging between users, this is gonna be an early and somewhat limited version but it will at least come in handy for in-game communication.

Finally the ability to share demos for your community, and a ton of bugfixes.

Full list of changes:
- Trophy presentation rework
- Several mobile fixes
- Finished tactic editor mobile version
- Revamped mobile 2d viewer
- Private messaging
- Demo sharing
- New sidebar tactic menu
- Lots of bugfixes and server optimizations

This will be pushed Thursday 17 at 4pm CET

Season 3 updates

Hey everyone!

Welcome to season 3, i'm going to explain the biggest changes now.

Revised tactic editor

We've reworked the tactic editor, now it should be faster and easier to use, with many features to make your live easier. We also been working on a mobile version, while is still not 100% finished it's much more usable than before and you can get to change small stuff.

Here is the full list of changes:
- Performance improvement
- High quality image
- Mobile working version (still in progress)
- Smooth points selection/deselection via both clicking map and sidebar
- Points movement with arrow keys
- Zoom and pan
- Multi points movement via multi selection
- Flash toggle only toggles flash area and not nade
- Path swap between players
- Point order swap within player path
- Afterplant visibility toggle

I'll probably make a short video explaining most of these.

Gear added

Very excited about this one, we've added the Shop with gear items you can buy and equip your players to boost their skills. We've also added the option in the lineup page to choose which games should use equipment as well as match preparation.
An important note, is that every game except training games (scrims / custom competitions) spend gear if enabled.
Meaning playing any type of non-custom tournament like **qualies**, opens, major counts towards the gear durability, as well as league and ladder matches.

Then just a reminder about the system changes we announce sometime ago:
- 56 teams in S-Tier
- A-Tier competitions now have **FOW OFF**
- Minor/challengers tournaments require qualification just like major
- Added small weekly tournaments, that can only be played once per week

Patch Notes - 1.0.4

Highlights:

A very small patch ahead of the majors and the upcoming season. The most important thing is that as of right now when a team goes bankrupt the user is simply banned, which is definitely not the best experience, so we've reworked that so the user retains access to their account and once they log in they get a screen with an option to reset their team and get a new one.

By the way we are going to reschedule these patches to every Monday to match when new seasons are up.

Full list of changes:
- Users receive a message when news are posted
- You can now undo adding a player to blacklist
- Season preview page (pushed off-schedule)
- Added team reset option for bankrupted users
- UI now shows vest health
- Several bug fixes

This is live already.

Patch notes - 1.0.3

Highlights:

Not a lot of stuff coming up in this patch, as we've been fixing some significant bugs and we are also heads down working on the bulk simulator and tactic editor page revamp.

Full list of changes:

- Dedicated page for custom competitions
- New banner/logo popups with requirements/info
- Added filters for total skill points and total limits to teams ranking
- Added match type filters to players ranking
- Several bugfixes

This is live now, sorry for the late notice.

Tournaments, tiers and more

Hello everyone, big news incoming!

I know we are still a few weeks to go before next season but wanted to share the plans for the most important aspects of the game that's been heavily discussed in the community.

TOURNAMENTS
The goal of these changes is to find a balance between having a lot of action during the season while also not overcharging managers with matches to prepare.

Majors
We are happy with current state of majors but feel like with the tiers system we are not gonna see as many teams as we'd like, so we are reducing the number of slots for the qualies as well giving the chance to everyone who tried to compete.
- Qualification slots 16 => 8
- Everyone who failed to qualify but tried at least 5 times will auto qualify the day before major. They won't be granted any RP/Money from this qualification.

Minors
You can think of these as the current opens, we'll do 2 every season just like now, but instead of having a massive preliminary stage we are going to also have qualification tournaments for these.
- Renamed open => minors
- Not free to join anymore, needs to win qualification tourney with 8 slots

High stakes
Just like current season we are going to hold a mid-season big tourney with all tiers. The only difference is that we are not going to have a massive day of matches on a Friday, but rather we'll play the Swiss rounds in weekends of the 1st and 2nd week. This way we can add some action to the weekends and the preliminaries don't feel bloated.
- Preliminary/Swiss stage to be held on weekends on 1st and 2nd week, 2 games each day for a total of 4 games per weekend and a grand total of 8 rounds.
- Since matches will be generated as soon as season starts, seeding will be based on early rankings.

New opens
This will be open sign-up weekly tournaments with low reward, autogenerated as soon as one is filled. Each team will only be able to play 1 open per week.
- **16 slots low reward** tournaments (RP + Money)
- Generated weekly per tier, as soon as one is filled another is generated
- Teams can only play 1 per week
- Generic trophy

Patch notes - 1.0.2

Highlights:

We have a big one coming up in this patch, which is the introduction of Custom Competitions. These are custom tournaments where you can pick the format and play with friends or whoever you like.

Another one worth explaining is the turn speed change when throwing nades. As you may already know, players need to face the direction they are throwing the nade before throwing it. The way it currently works is that players quickness skill affect how fast they turn to throw the nade, the impact is pretty slow but there's still a few degrees difference between low and high quickness.

So we want to get rid of that and make it a flat turn speed, what does this mean for your tactics? probably you won't have to worry about it but in essence your players will likely throw nades slightly faster than usual so maybe check your tactics nade timings just in case.

Other than that these are all self-explanatory bugfixes and quality of life improvements

Full list of changes:
- Reintroduced demos
- Morale modifiers fix, deleting expired and duplicates
- Players turn speed when throwing nades was scaling with quickness, removed scaling and now is flat speed
- Custom tournaments / leagues added
- New privacy settings, share to admins and community
- Added teams page hits and last visitor
- Tracking matches views now
- New blind indicator also on simulator
- Map filter for matches
- Paginated played matches
- Added name of tactics being deleted/duplicated
- Added tactic type column on tactic stats page
- Added transfers to hall of fame

This will be pushed 19 Thursday around 3am CET.

Patch notes - 1.0.1

Hello everyone! we have now setup a deployment schedule where fixes and changes will be pushed every thursday morning. Those changes will be notified a few days in advance. This is our very first official patch marking the 1.0.1 version.

Highlights:
We got many quality of life improvements as well as small bugfixes and changes that will positively impact the experience.

Player training at it's last stages should be less frustrating now where if one skill is only 1sp to be maxed and the trained amount was 2sp then the overflow is not wasted anymore but applied to the other skill in the focus combo. Also skill decaying before training should help keeping players at their max at all times.

We are also increasing the time before players meet and get visible in fow ON matches by 0.4 seconds, we are experimenting with different values so we are going slow, we want to make sure the fights don't seem to abrupt and are more enjoyable.

Full list of changes:
- Training overflow correctly applying to the non-maxed skill
- Training focus skill RNG capped at 3 days in a row
- Players decay now happening before training, training rescheduled to a few hours later in the morning
- New notification alerting of next ladder opponent
- Increased visibility threshold from 0.6s to 1s when fow ON
- Updated banner layout and recommended size
- Added match type filters in matches page
- Morale detailed info
- Restore defaults button
- Save as demo to avoid matches being wiped on season update

To clarify once more, this changes will be live on 12 June 3am CET

Welcome to season 2!

Hello everyone! kicking of season 2 with finally an implementation of a news system.

Here's a rundown of all changes.

New Tiers A and B
All current users are now categorized as either Tier S and A based on the end of season 1 ranking, a 3rd Tier B was created and assigned to all season 2 new users.
Each tier has a unique set of open tournaments and majors. Fog of war is only disabled for Tier B tournaments and Iron League games

Fame Rework
We’ve overhauled how Fame is earned, more ways to gain Fame through matches and other events.

• Streaming: +12 => +6,
• Ladder games: +3 to loser players, +4 to winners except MVP, +5 to the MVP,
• League games: +4 to loser players, +5 to winners except MVP, +6 to the MVP,
• Tournament best player: +50,
• Inactivity decay: -6

Financial adjustments
The Academy’s upkeep cost is going up from 0 to 2200 CPL per week League matches streaming payouts will see a 10 % decrease.

Talent Reset System Rework Resetting your talent tree is getting an overhaul, one-click resets now refund a portion of spent points. When a talent is orange it means your selection was saved and locked, if it's light yellow it means you are currently selecting the talent but have not yet saved, so you can right click to decrement and add the point somewhere else.

“Stab” Talent Redesigned as “Point-Blank”
Renaming and rebalance, the old stab talent becomes Point-Blank, focusing on close-range bonuses with a gun rather than a knife.

Map Rotation
Say bye to Train and hello Mill!, next season rotation is Castle - Mill

Specials Icons Changes
Removed: Resilient, Cyclothymic, Cheerful, Grumpy
Reworked: Toxic, Try-Hard Some of these didn't make sense and were leftovers from beta, and some needed a rework

Ladder changes Ladder had some improvements and experience will be much better:

• No streaks
• Better matchmaking
• Less likely to face the same opponent
• Consistent map cycle

Leadership perks Some small changes and new features, mainly the introduction of vest repair.

Remember to join our discord to stay up to date with the community.