Hello Lumia Island survivors!

Thank you so much for your support throughout our first season, from the 3 Eternal Return Masters to the Season 1 Finals in Daejeon.

The big changes we made in Season 1 really changed the face of the tournaments, and we've gotten a lot of feedback from viewers, players, and even from our team. We've seen some great performances from a lot of players over the course of the season which made it exciting, so we'd like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all the players who participated and all the viewers who watched our Esports events.

In this post, we'd like to talk about the next season's Esports schedule, the new international tournament coming your way and the rules for these events. 

Season 2 Esports Tournament Schedule

First up is the schedule for the Eternal Return Masters, which will continue to work as last season.

Additionally, the Cobalt Cup will be back in January after all Masters have concluded, filling the gap between ER Masters and the Season Finals.

There will be two large offline competitions this season: the ER Global Invitational in Busan and the Season 2 Finals in Daejeon. Check out the schedule below!

Understanding Season 1’s Rules - Checkpoint Rule

We made three main Esports rules changes last season: removing the duplicate combination restriction rule, revamping the point matrix, and the introduction of the checkpoint rule. All of these changes were necessary and they all had an impact in the tournaments in different ways.

The change to the point matrix was probably the least noticeable of the three for viewers. The main purpose behind these changes was to reduce a bit  the number of points that players got, which made the gap between the top and bottom teams smaller. This made it seem like the same number of kills, for example 10 kills at 5 points per kill and at 1 point per kill would result in a big gap of  50 points and 10 points respectively. We received some feedback regarding this from the players in the events, who thought this felt much more reachable in cases when they fell behind. 

While players with some experience with Battle Royale games Esports might be familiar with the checkpoint rule, it may be new to those who are new to Eternal Returns Esports. We've gotten a lot of feedback about the checkpoint rule from the community, as well as from players and other people involved, so we wanted to take a moment to share our thoughts on it.

The Battle Royale genre has always been one of the hardest to get into Esports, and there are a few common problems with the way many tournaments are structured - a set number of rounds and point structure, like the ones in Early Access.

First, the final rounds become meaningless when the score is already somewhat defined.

Secondly, you have to wait for the scores to be summed up, so winners are only decided once the last fight is over.

High and Low placed players suffer from the same first problem. If their placement is somehow “obvious”, it's hard to expect any dramatic changes in the standings, which increases the likelihood of matches that aren't as competitive. The second problem affects the overall viewer experience: in other games, the moment a team KOs their opponent or gets a GG, they can get up and pick up their trophy, but in Battle Royale games, players don't know where they stand until the final score is announced which is a bit anticlimactic.

This is where a checkpoint rule can enhance the viewer experience as well as the player experience. With fixed rounds it’s hard to have exciting shifts in the events but in a typical “3 out of five” format, it's possible to be on the verge of a shutout and still come back to tie a set, or even win the match at the end. A checkpoint rule gives you the chance to still be able to win a match even when you haven’t hit the checkpoints yet, which encourages players to go hard until the end! I'm sure many of you remember the excitement of the 8th round of Season 1 Finals when the Favor team won a teamfight against the OwO team, adding up another round to the event.

The moment when a player gets the last GG in a tournament’s tiebreaker, confirming a victory can be so climactic that it greatly affects both the viewer and player experience. The checkpoint rule allows you to have the same experience as a multiplayer format. In the Season 1 Finals, after the final battle between Favor and Asher ended, the players knew they had won, and they didn't have to wait for the score to be calculated before they walked onto the stage and lifted their trophy, which is something you wouldn't see without the checkpoint rule.

This is not to say that the current checkpoint rule is perfect, because from a tournament perspective, the ideal time for a match to end is when 3 to 5 teams have met the checkpoint, basically when more than half of all teams have met the checkpoint and when the odds of the teams that haven't met it being the final survivors become smaller than the odds of the teams that have met the checkpoint. If you look at some of the recent finals we've had, sometimes we've had six, seven, even eight teams cross the checkpoint. Part of the reason is that the teams that didn't make the checkpoint did their best, but also because currently it's really easy for some teams to win. As we mentioned in the patch notes, we're rolling out a series of changes to the temporary and final restricted areas to address this, as well as limiting the amount of information players can get towards the end of the game through a different patch. We hope these patches will help us have better and more competitive matches. 

We’ve also received a lot of feedback to add a ceiling or round limit, and we’ve been working on that since the first Masters with the Checkpoint rule, but this doesn’t seem feasible at this point. This is because there is a high risk that the viewer and player experience will revert back to the fixed round system mentioned above. Therefore, we believe that the direction we should take for the tournament is to improve the quality of the game from the temporary restricted area phase until the end of the game, rather than changing the big picture of the checkpoint system. 

Think of tournaments with a checkpoint rule as consisting of two phases. The first phase consists of players trying to accumulate points as fast as possible to create a winning situation. In fact, one interpretation of the rule is to think of the two phases as two different games, and to have two game plans, as MIRAEN SEJONG did in this trial match. In Battle Royale Esports, it's considered a very important skill to be able to take advantage of a situation where you can win and actually win the round. Therefore, being able to get to the checkpoint quickly and then take advantage of that opportunity for one more round, and actually win from that opportunity, is going to be the key to being able to navigate the checkpoint rule in the future. 

New rules regarding character selection will be added to ensure a wide variety of test subjects in tournaments

During the first season, we ran the competition without any pick rules because we wanted to see what kind of character pool players would use in a competitive setting and how much restriction would be needed to encourage them to use different characters. In particular, we realized that the method we used in Duo tournaments, which was simply swapping out one pick for another while leaving the meta-pick, was not enough to limit the amount of specific characters that viewers wanted to see. So, rather than reintroducing the meta-pick method, we wanted to find a new way to do it.

In a typical team vs team MOBA game, bans can mean a number of things. They can be used to lock down OP picks that normally wouldn't be available in a situation where players don't know each other, to block a specific player when players have information of that opponent, or to create a comfortable composition if there is a pick that interferes with a combination a player has prepared. However, it seems like in Battle Royale matches there is no way to sequentially alternate bans and picks like in MOBA matches. There has been a lot of talk about bans through voting, but this seems difficult to apply because voting is a way for teams to collude and keep certain teams in check without risking themselves. Therefore, we wanted to try to organize bans in a way that allows players to fulfill the purposes mentioned above in limited circumstances, while keeping meta-picks in mind. That's why we implemented a new pick rule for the Season 2 trial matches, where if three or more players pick the same character in a round, that character will be locked for the next round.

Since the game is premised on multiplayer competition, it’s better to approach the ban format like board games and TCGs do, where the field effect is applied to all participants, rather than the typical team vs team MOBA ban format. This field effect can be changed by investing in a change of the field to your advantage. In other words, since "characters selected by more than 3 people cannot be used in the next round", if there are two specific picks, you can invest by selecting those picks to intentionally build the setting for the next round by getting those characters banned. There is also a possibility that some teams can intentionally follow the picks to keep certain teams in check, but the risk for them to do that is rather high compared to the voting system. Simply put, if players use the character of their skilled opponent when they are less skilled with that character compared to that player, their game may not go the way they want, which means they would have to take the blow in order to penalize the other player.

So far, being able to play multiple characters hasn't been a huge advantage, but we think it could be a definite strength going forward, especially with the changing bans from round to round. After the trial matches, we've gotten feedback that the rules are both too harsh and not harsh enough, so there's room for us to loosen or tighten them up once we have more data on how they work in a competitive setting.

Eternal Return Global Invitational in Busan, South Korea

As you may already know, we’ll be holding the Global Invitational at the Busan Esports Arena (Brena) on Saturday, December 9th. The tournament is organized by the Busan Metropolitan City, Busan Information Industry Promotion Agency, and Nimble Neuron, and some overseas teams will be invited to participate in this event.

Korea plans to select the participating teams through a separate qualifier, while the overseas teams will be invited based on their rankings or on their experience with tournaments. There will be four teams from Korea, one from North America, and one from Japan participating offline, while the rest of the teams will be participating online: 2 from China and 2 from Southeast Asia.

Various events will be organized at the venue, including the coming into life and sale of Bread in Tears, some booths at the Lumia Night Market, and our Official Merch Shop. We’ll be announcing more details about the Korean teams’ qualifiers for the event soon.

§ Scrimmage Rules

At the moment, Ranked premade teams are not available for Mythril and above, so players can only practice with their teammates in Custom Games scrimmages. Many of you held private scrimmages last season, so we know there's a lot of demand for them. 

As we mentioned before Official launch, when we were thinking about how we could support official scrimmages, we also thought about running them, which of course didn’t necessarily mean financially supporting them or making our own official scrimmages. However, we've put the idea of official scrimmages on hold because we've heard that it could hurt the servers that are doing well in this regard. In fact, when we were considering official scrimmages earlier in the season, one of the current scrimmage servers said that they would no longer run their server if there were official scrimmages, so that idea fell through. In addition to this, official scrimmages would require a very inflexible management, which may not be appropriate for the current demand for scrimmages so we’re sorry for any confusions we caused when talking about it. 

We've received quite a few comments about the lack of options for scrimmages due to only one server fully functioning at the moment, so we're working on a small reward system to encourage a wider variety of players to try running scrimmages. Players who commit to running scrimmages for a whole season will get the following rewards:

• 1 or 2 Players that organize scrimmages twice a week for a period of 6 weeks during the Season, including Preseason, will receive the Next Season Pack + 1200 NP 
• 3 to 5 Players that organize scrimmages 4 or more times a week for a period of longer than 6 weeks during the Season, including Preseason, will receive the Next Season Pack + 1200 NP 

In order to receive rewards, players need to verify that their discord servers are actually for running scrimmages. If you are running a scrimmage server, or plan to do so, send us an email to esports@nimbleneuron.com with your information. Additionally, we'll be adding the list of scrimmage servers on the Tournament Discord to make them more visible to the public. We hope many of you can participate! 

Eternal Returns Esports Code of Conduct

Starting this season, we're implementing the Eternal Return Esports: Code of Conduct, which is different from ER’s Rules of Conduct and serves as a minimum baseline to ensure that all members of the Eternal Return Esports community are aware of the moral and ethical rules they need to follow in order to keep a healthy community running. As it applies to everyone, including players, parties involved, and staff, we ask that you consider it the first step in building a better Eternal Return Esports community, and that you familiarize yourself with the Code of Conduct to avoid any inconveniences and penalties.

• Eternal Return Esports: Code of Conduct [See More]

What’s coming on Eternal Return Esports?

Eternal Return Esports aims to grow with the community. Although we’re still quite small, our whole Eternal Return Esports team is working hard to make it feel the best as possible. Although simple, the performance we prepared for the Season 1 Finals and the events where we could spend some time with the audience were part of our efforts to make more enjoyable memories. We also prepared offline interviews after the game so that more players could be known to the viewers and build a bigger fanbase. In other words, we want to become a bridge between the players and the community through these actions.

On top of that, thanks to the recent establishment of the Eternal Return Pro Team MIRAEN SEJONG, many people are interested in Eternal Return Esports, so we will work harder so that the current players can participate in a better tournament setting. We look forward to hearing a lot of good news in the future, so that everyone watching can also feel that Eternal Return Esports is growing little by little, step by step.

Thank you all for reading and supporting Eternal Return Esports. We hope to see you soon in all our events planned!