Hello everyone, big season ahead. Here’s what’s coming:

New Championship Structure

We’re rolling out the new championship structure we previously shared here, with a significant prestige boost to the Major.

One additional change not mentioned in that post: C-Tier teams are being removed from the championship flow.

Since C-Tier teams already compete in the Rookies Cup, we want to avoid situations where smurfs or highly experienced players snowball through the system. Beating rookies already provides enough advantage.

League Changes

We’re very happy with how the first season of fully populated leagues went. These are two small but important tweaks: 

• Community-first matchups:

Similar to tournament groups, commates will face each other earlier in the season (and again mid-season for second-leg matches). This helps reduce the risk of match-fixing in the final rounds.

• Relegation avoidance prize:

Currently, prizes go down to 7th place only. We’re adding a small reward for teams finishing 8th if they successfully defend their league spot through qualification matches. This reward will remain lower than the 7th-place prize.

Ladder Changes

The ladder has been in a good spot for several seasons. This change addresses early-round Buchholz randomness. The first 4 rounds will be “placement matches” Matchups will be half-split rank based: Given 400 teams, #1 ranked plays #201, #2 plays #202, etc. 

• These 4 matches will not count toward Buchholz
• From Round 5 onward, matchmaking returns to normal
• Round difference will be used initially

Game Engine Updates

We’re rolling out important engine updates aimed at: 

• Improving balance for weaker skills
• Making scaling feel more impactful so player strength differences are clearer

Full details here.

Event Changes

Event adjustments and tweaks, the decay reduction to 10% will apply during season update. Full breakdown here.

New Leader Perk: Cycle Repeat

We’re introducing a new optional leader perk to address tactic repetition issues.

Problem: Even after all tactics are used, CL can sometimes pick a tactic that recently lost. We fixed this for immediate repeats, but the issue can still happen one round later.

Solution: With Cycle Repeat, CL will reuse the same tactic order from the first cycle.

Example:

Available tactics: A, B, C, D, E

First cycle order: C → A → B → E → D

Second cycle order: C → A → B → E → D

This ensures recently failed tactics aren’t reused until all others have been played. This perk can backfire against opponents without fixed-order behavior, which is why it’s implemented as an optional perk, not a default rule.

Introductory Phase

This is a major feature we’ve been working on and expect to release early next season. It’s a complete rework of the newcomer experience, featuring: 

• Progressive unlocking of game areas
• Missions and tutorials
• A guided onboarding flow to help new users start strong

Dustline

We know there are still many bugs on the new map, and we are very grateful to everyone for testing. Next season we want to focus on these fixes and we plan to do a coins-prize tournament sometime during the season, ahead of fully releasing the map on season 10.

Train map adjustments

We are fixing two areas that has been a problem for some time.

1- There was a "hole" here in the fence that would allow Ts to spot transitioning CTs

2- This area no longer blocks vision, and there's no banned positions around it.