The Spirit of the Tournament:

At its core, the MechWarrior Online World Championship Tournament is a “Best of the Best” Tournament, intended to pit the 8 best players from each Team against their opponents in a fight for the title of Regional or World Championship.

The structure that we have chosen for the Tournament is intended to be fair and inclusive across the board, from start to finish; it is our goal to ensure that everyone who enters the tournament has a fair chance in the name of sportsmanship and fair play.

Scheduling of the Tournament Matches:

With no existing seed or official ranking system in place with which to draw from, the tournament has been structured as a Round Robin to help ensure sure that every team an equal opportunity to participate, with each team playing against every other team in their Region at least once. In order to keep this process as streamlined as possible, and to have all matches completed in a timely manner, each match will be a best-of-1 in the Conquest game mode.

If a team loses once, they are not eliminated from the tournament as a whole. That loss is simply marked in that team’s Tournament standings. Once all of the Regional Qualifier matches are complete, the top five teams from each region with the most amount of wins will move on to the Regional Finals.

While we strongly encourage Teams to field their 8 best players in each match as often as possible to ensure victory, we understand that life events and scheduling conflicts do arise, and thus provided up to a maximum of four additional players slots to be filled by relief players. Given our desire for making this a true “Best of the Best” competition, we believe that the maximum of 12 Team Member slots provides sufficient leeway for tackling potential scheduling issues, should they arise.

That being said, the current Regional Qualifier schedule was released last week, and can be found here. This was initially going to be a rigid schedule, with matches only being conducted at the assigned times, but based on feedback and subsequent investigation, we will be making the following adjustments outlined below. We believe these adjustments will help to mitigate some of the larger concerns we’ve seen regarding match scheduling.

• Teams can agree to play their assigned match at any time prior to the end of the week of their scheduled time slot.

• This means that as long as the match is played by the end of day of the Sunday in their scheduled match week, the match will count.
• Example: Two Teams can agree to play their match, officially scheduled for Thursday September 22^nd, at any time prior to Sunday September 25^th at 11:59 PM. If they so choose, the two Teams can agree to play that match even as early as the official start of the Regional Qualifiers in June.

• Both teams will be required to submit a screenshot of the results, with the understanding that doing so affirms that both Teams agree with the match outcome and that there are no complications or issues with the match as it was conducted.
• Matches that are played outside of the official, scheduled time slot will not have an official Tournament Referee.
• If there are any rule violations in a match, or if a Team has any issues with the match as it was conducted, Tournament Officials must be notified. Pending the result of an official review, the match in question may then have to be played at its original, officially scheduled time in order to be counted.
• A new forum sub-section will be created for Tournament participants, to be used for match scheduling.

This should provide all Teams with greater flexibility as to when they play, and to better adjust match scheduling according to player availability.