Hello Lumia Island survivors!
Thank you for supporting Eternal Return Esports during Early Access. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for tuning in and all of our players for participating in the Masters Open, Season Finals, and other events. We wanted to let you guys know a bit more about the upcoming season for esports in the Asia server.
Eternal Return 1.0 Esports will also go through some changes. With the changes in game modes, we’ll also be rearranging the way our events are organized, and most importantly, we'll be trying to figure out the best way to run tournaments for the rest of 2023 as the game continues to change. Today, we'd like to give you a quick overview of how we envision the tournament working for the rest of 2023 and beyond.
Eternal Return Masters Go Back to Squads
Eternal Return Masters is coming back as a Squad tournament. As such, the format will be different from the previous Solo/Duo tournaments. The Masters tournament will consist of 8 seeded teams from the previous season, plus 8 teams from Qualifiers, with each event lasting 3 days.
For the Season Finals, where the final standings and prizes are determined, we'll use the "last one standing after a certain number of points" format we used in the last LCQ. Since winning is not guaranteed just by getting ahead in Early Game, it's going to be a nail-biting event that will keep fans on the edge of their seats until the very end.
Circuit Points
In the past, we've used Circuit Points from various tournaments, including Masters, to select teams for the Season Finals. This season, we'll operate in a similar fashion, with Circuit Points awarded for tournaments held by recognized groups and organizations.
New Point Matrix and Rules
While the previous point matrix has been in place for quite some time, the scale of scoring was too large and made it difficult to intuitively understand scores. The new point matrix aims to make it easier to calculate your score by converting 1 kill to 1 point.
As before, only field kills (FK) will be counted, not Battle Zone kills, and we're keeping the penalty points for getting eliminated by Wild Animals or Restricted Areas. However, as you might already know, Battle Zones now happen once per match. After holding close-to competitive environments scrims, we’ve seen a bit more of a preference for Battle Zones, so we're going to watch this carefully and consider giving some credit for Battle Zone kills as well.
Cobalt Challenge Cup
Last Season's First Cobalt Challenge Cup featured a new face of Eternal Return with the introduction of the ban pick phase. We had a lot of fun with the Cobalt Challenge Cup, which was a little more strategic than originally expected, and we enjoyed seeing the different strategies that players came up with along the way.
The Cobalt Challenge Cup will be running again this season and we hope to see many of you trying out different combinations on the new Cobalt Protocol.
Scrims
Since launch, we've heard a lot of concerns from the community and directly from our team about the practice experience for Mythril and higher tiers players, where premade matches are not possible. At this point, we don't know exactly how much demand there is for scrims, but we'll be making sure to create an environment for players to practice throughout the season as they prepare for tournaments in a variety of ways. One of our favorites is the Value up Scrim, run by one of our current casters and creators, PILLUS. For this scrim, we will be posting translated instructions for non-Korean speakers at a later date, so we hope you can all participate!.
Value up Scrim Discord : https://discord.com/invite/F3a4m3N9SK
2023 Season 1 Tournament Schedule
While we don't have all of the tournaments scheduled yet, we can reveal the Masters schedule first. A total of three Masters will be held this season.
We're still working on Season Finals and LCQs with the organizers, so we'll keep you posted!
After 2023
We'll be trying a lot of things over the next two seasons in 2023, but we'd also like to talk a little bit about what we're looking to do after that. There are two big things we're looking at right now: introducing a league system and extending the length of the esports season.
A league system will be the best way to constantly expose teams and build game awareness. We've tried league formats in the past, such as the Eternal Return League (ERL), but at the time we found that the current Masters-centered, short-term tournament format was the most appropriate to organize and manage, so that’s when we came up with the Masters Season Finals structure. However, as the competition is reorganized into Squads, we are thinking about whether we can manage to create a league system again if this attracts enough interest from our viewers and players. If that happens, we will be able to more actively seek out ways for the participating teams and league to grow at the same time, so we are thinking about making Masters into a league and establishing new smaller tournaments.
We're also considering extending the esports season to 6 months. If a league system is introduced, we believe that it would be more beneficial for teams to have 2 seasons rather than 4 seasons a year, so that once a team joins a league, they are guaranteed to play for about half a year. The Season Finals could also become even more significant by holding them once every six months. Additionally, we're thinking about holding a small offline tournament in the middle of each season where fans can see players live in front of them. Here’s how this would look in a nutshell.
It is important to note that the above is not yet finalized and it is subject to change as future tournaments proceed.
This season and the next will be an ongoing journey to find the right structure for the new Eternal Return, and we'll do our best to make it as enjoyable as possible for everyone who participates and everyone who watches. We will keep you updated on the details of each tournament and more.
Stay tuned for more information on the 2023 Esports Season 1!
