CRAFTINGSTARS.COM WE’RE ALL WINNERS LEAGUE

CRAFTINGSTARS.COM WE’RE ALL WINNERS LEAGUE
5PM PST WEEKNIGHTS
OPEN LEAGUE PLAY MONDAY APRIL 11th- FRIDAY MAY 6th

We’re starting what we’d term a ‘community team league,’ a free competition to encourage SC2 gamers to bond together over awesomeness. This is a league that will encompass multiple skill levels – and in fact, we believe that our structure allows teams without a full roster of high masters players to compete with at least some equity. Most importantly, though, this is a league with a focus on fun, community, and the magic of friendship, and we’ve got a lot of good things planned to help with that.

Our league is a team league. This is important for a number of reasons: one, it will facilitate the creation of awesome little communities for you to practice in (yes, you, start a team), and two, it allows us to use the greatest tournament format known to man: the winners league format. We’ve made several modifications to this, but the basics stand: two men enter, one man leaves. The other man stays until he is defeated, while his opponent’s team must send a new player to attempt to dethrone him.

Interspersed with the 1v1 winners league matches will be a variety of fun challenges for the teams. There will be a total of 4 challenges and 4 regular 1v1 matches, weighted equally, with a final 1v1 ace match should the teams be even at this point.

Map pools for all events will be published at least three days in advance of each match, and the map for each game will be known ahead of time. We plan to use the ladder map pool for nearly all of our maps as we expect many teams will use the ladder as a primary means of practice. Teams will announce their first player to an event organizer ahead of time blindly, and the first player for each team must play random for the first game. Race switches afterwards are allowed.

The 4 challenges are as follows:

1 & 2: 4v4 MONOBATTLES. Although you’re probably familiar with this concept, we’ve made a number of modifications to this in order to make this watchable and more fun.

a) A team is randomly chosen to pick first

b) Each team captain removes a unit from the pool of available units, starting with the team that picks first

c) Teams choose 4 units via an alternating draft (1-2-2-2-1). When a unit is chosen, it is removed from the pool of available units

d) For the second monobattle, teams again draft (1-2-2-2-1) from the remaining pool of unchosen units, with the team that picked second for the first game first.

3: COACHING CHALLENGE. The tournament organizers will assign each team a bronze player 7 days before the match. During those 7 days, the team will coach that bronze player to the best of their ability. The bronze players will play a 1v1 for the third challenge. We’ll have measures in place to prevent both smurfing and collusion.

4: 2v2. The fourth challenge is a normal, no-holds barred 2v2 match.

The final match of the best of 9 will be an ace 1v1 match, meaning that players may send any player, regardless of the status of previous matches.

The minimum team size for this is 4, although 6 is probably much more ideal. There is no maximum team size, but if you have 12 or more people you probably ought to split. We’d also like to enforce a ‘no sponsored player rule,’ which basically says that you can’t have players on your roster that are sponsored or on srsbsns teams that actually win things. If you’re on one of those teams and think this is awesome and want to play in it, though, send us an e-mail and we’ll talk about how you can be involved while still being fair to other players.

The league will not be an elimination tournament, but rather round robin play for several weeks, after which we will run a brief elimination tournament between the highest ranked teams to determine an ultimate winner. Matches will be streamed by a variety of esteemed casters as well as the teams themselves (more on that in a minute). The exact makeup and frequency of these ranking matches will depend on the number of responses we get, but if there’s enough interest we can have multiple divisions to allow for better matching of skill.

One final distinctive feature is that we’d like to strongly encourage teams to stream as they play the monobattles. We feel that having the added feature of being able to listen to team communications will enhance viewing pleasure and we don’t feel like stream cheating is going to be a huge risk when not only is every unit composition is known in advance, but both teams are streaming their communications.

So what do we need from you? First off, we need you to get the word out: tell people we’re running this. Second, go start teams! If you don’t have any friends that play sc2, join the tl.net or screddit IRC or in-game channels and start a team with some people there. Third, we’re looking for volunteers to help cast and stream.

If you have a team, shoot us an email (wawl@craftingstars.com) with the following things:
1) Team captain’s name and id on battlenet
2) Team captain’s email
3) Team members’ names, bnet ids, and races
4) Rough average skill level of the team (e.g. low masters, high plat, whatever. Ideally we’ll get enough teams to have more than one division).

We’d like you to be available most weekdays from 5pm PST (8pm EST) until whenever a bo9 would end, but if you’re only available certain days please mention that.

If you can cast / stream, send us an email (wawl@craftingstars.com) with this set of information:

1) Your rough 1v1 points / league last season
2) Any srsbsns 2v2 experience you have (diamond or higher)
3) Your casting experience
4) What definition you can stream in and how many viewers it can support
5) How experienced you are with your streaming setup
6) How we can get in touch with you
7) If you’ve entered on a team, and which team that is.
8) Your general availabilty
We’re fine with people both casting and playing but we need to know in advance so we can make sure there are no conflicts.

Finally, if you’re a bronze player, look for our searches as the league progresses. Rainbows out!

Q&A

Why does the first player play random?

Having the first player play random 1v1 ensures that each team has at least one player that can play all races competently, which makes the coaching challenge possible.

The challenges can secure up to 4 wins in a best of 9, allowing a team that lost all the 1v1’s to still advance to the ace match. How is this fair?

Two things. One, the Craftingstars.com We’re All Winners League is an event all about community, teams, friendship, and fun, not about 1v1 SC2 (although there’s a fairly large dose of that). Two, you’ll notice that the 1v1 section comprises 5 points, whereas the challenges are 4 – if by some freak chance you do happen to lose all of the team events but win the 1v1’s, your team will be declared victorious.

Why are the monobattle rules so convoluted? Why can’t we just play straight monobattles?

We’re afraid that the monobattles would degrade very quickly into hellion/zergling/warpgate shenanigans quite quickly without limits on the units players could choose, and allowing the teams to place the limits through bans and drafts feels better to us than imposing arbitrary limits ourselves. No repeat units also makes for games that are both easier to follow and more entertaining to watch.

Is there a prize?

Not at the moment. We’d love to pick up a sponsor, though, so if you find one, let us know!