EPTAbout:: http://sc2ctl.com/about
Format: http://sc2ctl.com/format
Stream: http://twitch.tv/sc2ctl
What is it?
SC2CTL is a long-format, division-separated Community Team League. It was designed with the primary goal of being incredible fun for everyone involved, while not forgetting the joy of being crowned the sole victor. To that end, SC2CTL was built with a format that will yield (roughly, and in most cases - certain odd numbers can do weird things to tournament formats) a ten (10) week tournament season with every team playing a minimum of six (6) weeks.
The divisions are separated into Bronze/Silver/Gold, Platinum/Diamond and Masters/Grandmasters. Teams can have players of any league on them, but they must participate in the division equal to the player of greatest league on their team (Eg. 4 bronzies and a masters player would have to play in the masters division). This is built for inclusion of those who might not have enough players to have a team in a single division, but still want to play.
What makes it different?
Fun team leagues for both low and high level players aren't very common place in the SC2 scene. We don't have wonderful sites like SCVRush[2] hosting tournaments in that format. However, there have been one or two instances of Team Leagues, and I've only participated in one. There were a couple of unfortunate circumstances and oversights that caused it to become a failure in the end, but it was a lot of fun. I've designed SC2CTL to fix these issues.
Scheduling: The single biggest problem I had was scheduling. Teams don't have consistent contact information, and sometimes don't respond until it's too late. It's hard to have an email thread saying, "I'm available tuesday, that good?" "No, it's not", and finally work out a time that works for everyone. To that end, SC2CTL has been integrated with Doodle[3] for match scheduling. When groups are posted (up to three weeks in advance), you can set up a doodle schedule. The link to this schedule will be displayed inline above the match in the bracket, so every team can view it, and each member on the participating teams can fill out their availability. Then, the team leaders simply look at the column that has five players from each team available, and notify each other that that's the day to play! Simple and painless.
Results: Sending emails to admins who can be busy and become non-responsive is a pain, and can slow down the league a lot. SC2CTL has partnered with GGTracker[4] for replay processing. After the game, the captain of the winning team will simply go to the SC2CTL match reporting wizard, and upload the replay for each match played. These are then sent flying over the internets to GGTracker which does all the heavy lifting determining winner and players and all that. The replays are then all stored on GGTrackers server, associated with your battle.net ID - even without you creating an account there! When you do create an account (as you absolutely should) you have full access to the GGTracker set of tools in the context of your CTL matches. You can where you had problems, key engagements that might have caused problems and plot your improvement over the course of the league.
Not only that, but the results are all automatically processed and recorded on the site - no need to wait for an admin to do it by hand, just spend all your time focusing on playing games.
What's the format?
The League has three phases: Two Groups stages and a playoff bracket. The group stages are played Round Robin, in groups of four. In this group stage each game win earns you two points and each game loss loses you one point. After the group stage is finished (3 weeks), the top two from each group will move on to "Upper" groups. The bottom two from each group will move on to "Lower" groups. The point values in "Upper" groups are doubled, as a reward for playing against more difficult opponents. At the end of the second group stage, the top scoring players will advance to a playoff bracket. The bracket is a maximum of 16 players in size, but if there's not enough teams in a division it will round to the closest 2x less than the number of participants. For example if there are 10 players, the top 8 will go into the playoff bracket. If there are seven, the top four will go into the playoff bracket.
After this, we will have crowned a winner! And then we can take a week or two off, before preparing for season 2!
Map Pool
1 Akilon Wastes
2 Bel'Shir Vestige
3 Derelict Watcher
4 Neo Planet S
5 Newkirk Redevelopment Precint
6 Star Station
7 Whirlwind
8 Gwangalli Beach
9 ESV Phoenix Cluster
Prizes?
Masters/Grandmasters Global Finals: 5 Das Keyboards
Diamond and below: 5 Das T-Shirts and 5 WASD keycap sets, creatively awarded. See http://sc2ctl.com/about for more info.
Europe?
All the posts about interested leagues and tournaments that I've seen have shafted Europe. I'm a Canadian, so I built this with NA in mind. That said, there's absolutely nothing restricting this league geographically, so I've created two sets of Tournaments: NA and EU. If there is enough people signed up into EU to generate a bracket, then EU will have a league. If there isn't, then that'd be unfortunate, but EU has a lot of pretty cool Starcraft players, right?
When is this happening?
Two weeks from now. This isn't something to be put in the pipeline then promptly forgot about. The site is completed, the league is ready to go, we just need enough time to get everyone who wants to participate signed up. So on Sunday, July 14th, 2013 we will generate the first set of groups and matches can begin playing out.
I've got some questions
Shoot. Comment here, send me a PM, hit up the subreddit for sc2ctl /r/sc2ctl or email ebonwumon@depotwarehouse.net
TL;DR
-Community team league for funsies
Web Site | Subreddit
Starts in two weeks. Hurry and get your team together.
