Posted in: eSports, Games, Video Games | Tagged: Counter Strike: Global Offensive, cs:go, ecs, eSports, Esports Championship Series, FACEIT
The ECS Changes Thing Up for Season 7 SC:GO Competition
The ECS (Esports Championship Series) has made a couple of changes for 2019, both cosmetic and in the way they're governing CS:GO tournaments. First, FACEIT has slightly rebranded itself with a new logo that you can see below, going for a more modernized version of the old flame logo and making it look more like an organization. But on top of that, the way the tournaments will be held and organized has changed a bit to encompass what appears to be a much more fair way of setting up brackets and determining schedules. This includes the addition of knockout matches so that teams that play will also play less, essentially giving them a bye in certain respects. Here's more details from the company.
Each season will still consist of four phases; the Open Qualifiers, Challenger Cup, Regular Season and LAN Finals. Open Qualifiers start on February 16th with teams from NA and EU competing in single elimination brackets, which teams can sign up for at http://fce.gg/ecs. Eight teams from each region will progress to the Challenger Cup on March 5th along with eight invited teams who will compete in a best-of-three Swiss format which will determine their ranking for the Regular Season.
The Regular Season starting on March 11th will then consist of five eight-team single elimination tournaments with each week offering a prize pool of $25,000 per region to maintain a consistent and high-level of competition. Each Regular Season tournament will be filled by the ECS Season 7 teams available for that week, with empty slots filled by Challenger Cup teams. The winners of the first three weeks of competition will head straight to the Finals, with the fourth spot per region filled by the team with the most overall prize money won over the five Regular Season cups.