Just want to bump this thread to remind everyone that there are just 10 days left of team registration for CEVO Season 5 before we release the first preseason schedules. If you have any questions about the upcoming season, feel free to post them below and Lange and I will do our best to reply here.

Yes, right here . You can also find it on the left nav of the event page at http://cevo.com/event/TFTVInvitational/?tg=99.

Hi gliss,

The purpose of the roster lock in a short tournament like this is so that teams can't pick up players from other teams who have been eliminated from the event or use ringers who weren't available for the entire tournament.

A regular forfeit loss doesn't result in anyone being disqualified from the tournament and counts as a "normal loss". The reason that teams were eliminated from the tournament after this particular forfeit loss was only because it was a double forfeit.

Unfortunately for whatever reason neither team checked into the match on the CEVO website nor did they make any effort to get the match scheduled in the match communication thread. When there is a double forfeit in the upper bracket of a double elimination tournament, it's impossible to decide which team should stay and which should be removed, so we removed both teams. I guess the only way we could have handled the situation differently would have been to flip a coin, but seeing as neither team made an effort to check in or schedule the match, we assumed the teams were not interested in playing.

Anyways, I can understand why you're upset about being removed from the tournament after just one loss, so come into our TeamSpeak or send me an email and I'll comp two of your players in Season 5 ($18x2=$34) to make up for your problems in the Spring Classic.

Thanks,
CEVO|Pipher

It also doesn't include the 24 BYOC seats at theGXL that we're going to pay for in CEVO-P. We're building as fast as we can, and as you mentioned previously, our prize pools are tied to how many players registered in the previous CEVO Season + community crowdfunding in the current season.

We're doing our best to build a sustainable league that has the ability to grow. I'm hoping that we'll be able to grow the prize pools and have an awesome LAN event again in s6, s7, and beyond.

We're still working out the details on this, hopefully we'll have an update for everyone soon.

Last call for TF2 Spring Classic teams! Extended registration closes tonight at midnight and we're currently sitting at 13/16 teams. We'll be releasing the brackets (random seeds) as soon as registration closes tonight, regardless of whether we fill the last 3 spots or not. Don't miss the last chance to secure a Main spot for your team next season.

In other news, we'll have an announcement out regarding Season 5 next Monday!

Thanks,
CEVO|Pipher

Hi guys,

Just want to give this thread one last bump to make sure that everyone is aware that this tournament is intended for anyone and everyone, there are absolutely no restrictions on who can or can't sign up. Registration is open until 11:59 PM Friday (30th) night and there are currently only 4/16 team slots filled. As Spangler mentioned above, this is a great way for teams that are new to CEVO to qualify directly for the s5 Main division, without having to play a season in Open. In addition to the s5 Main invites, there's also a small cash prize pool of $480 up for grabs. We'll also be previewing the automated TF2 match mod that we've been developing and are planning to use in Season 5!

If anyone has any last minute questions about the event feel free to reply here and we'll do our best to answer you as quickly as we can.

Thanks,
CEVO|Pipher

Thanks for the kind words kirby, we really appreciate them. We're going to do our absolute best not to let the league turn into a shitfest ever again! After this tournament, the Season 5 announcement is on the way and hopefully we can continue to turn things around @ CEVO TF2.

Amen!

This is a test server that wasn't supposed to be in circulation tonight, sorry about that. Please cancel and reserve a new server.

Just to be clear we haven't changed anything about the server configs or reservation process for the Playoffs.

Thanks,
CEVO|Pipher

TwitchTVJohn,

If you're looking for a place to host the tournament (registration, automated brackets, game servers, anti-cheat etc..) we're happy to volunteer our tournament platform. If you're interested, you know how to get in touch with me!

Thanks,
CEVO|Pipher

Traditionally we've had a very small number of players in CEVO playing in the Pacific time zone relative to the amount in the Central and Eastern US time zones. We set up the default times in National conferences to accommodate the majority of our user base. In some of our larger games we have multiple conferences with different default times in the same division, so that you're always playing against teams from your time zone. In TF2's case, this isn't really possible due to the # of teams.

From what I can gather TF2 teams seem to prefer to play their matches later than our other games, this may have to do with the average age or location of the players. Anyways, like I said in one of my other posts, we're going to revisit the actual default time for default matches in Season 5 based on the data we're currently collecting in Season 4.

This is something that we're hoping to address in Season 5. If we were to introduce something like the automatic accepting of proposals without a response after X number of hours, this wouldn't be an issue.

No, if the match is set at the default time we determine who should get the forfeit based on check-ins to the website only. Soker must have meant that if a team makes so effort to schedule and no one checks in to the match, the team who made the best effort to schedule will receive the forfeit win.

Yes, when you receive a forfeit win in CEVO we automatically schedule you a makeup match against another team who also received a forfeit win in that round.

The teams who receive forfiet losses are not rescheduled and that FFL is on their team record for the remainder of the season. So really the only teams who are getting punished are the ones who don't show up for their matches. The teams who are rescheduled, are just not being awarded a free win for a match they didn't actually play.

Thanks,
CEVO|Pipher

We did reach out to ESEA in an attempt to coordinate our map rotations because we anticipated it would be hard for teams playing in both leagues, but they weren't interested in collaborating. We thought we might have been able to just copy their map list, but it wasn't available, nor were their match dates at the start of the season. They ended up extending their registration period anyways, so I guess it would have thrown things off either way.

On the topic of scheduling, we add the matches to our system roughly 7 days in advance and players receive an email as soon as a match is added to their schedule. The reason that we have the deadline times on the same night as the default match night is so that we can be sure matches are complete before we schedule the next round's matches. If we extended the deadlines for each match and continued to schedule matches based on current team records, teams who consistently scheduled their matches late (after the next round of scheduling) could potentially manipulate their strength-of-schedule and receive easier matchups. This has been an issue in some of our other games.

With that said, I'm going to brainstorm with our TF2 team on how we might improve our scheduling procedures in divisions that are scheduled week-to-week. In the mean time, if both teams can agree to an time and date for their match that is past the deadline, create a support ticket and one of our staff will be happy to manually extend the deadline for you.

Thanks,
CEVO|Pipher

Hi radium,

I don't want to get too off-topic and hijack this thread, but the reason that we didn't have more than two skill divisions this season was simply a financial decision. At CEVO, we always guarantee our prize pools for the season, BEFORE we open up registration for the event. Given our past few seasons in TF2 had < 15 teams, we had absolutely no idea how many teams were going to register to pay-to-play in Season 4.

Nahanni donated $1,000 to help us get started and we matched that donation for a total prize pool of $2K. We decided that it would be too difficult to split that money up into three skill divisions, so that's how we arrived at 2 divisions.

Because we've had such an overwhelming turnout in s4(~70 teams), and we've committed to passing on ALL of s4's registration fees (less transaction costs) to the s5 prize pool, we're set to roughly triple the s4 prize pool next season. With the additional $$$ we'll certainly be able to expand to 3 and maybe even 4 skill divisions next season.

Let me know if you have any questions about this...