What is the ESOC Grand Tour?
The ESOC Grand Tour is a series of live, one-day tournaments that are hosted on weekends throughout the year. Tournaments usually consist of new and different formats, with the rules for a given event being posted each week before sign-ups open. Season 2 of the ESOC Grand Tour will contain five events, after which a Playoffs will be held among the top eight scoring players.
Your hosts for this season are @Cometk, @BrookG, @Mr_Bramboy, and [mention]g48[/mention].
How to Sign Up For a Tournament
- Sign up in the MyESOC tournament panel.
- Unless otherwise specified, the sign ups for any particular weekend tournament will open on Monday and close at 23:59 GMT on Friday.
- Brackets will be posted as soon as possible after sign-ups close, usually Saturday afternoon.
Point System
A system of tallied points is used over the course of the season. Over the five events of the tour, players must rack up as many points as they can. For each round a player wins, he receives points towards his tour record; each successive round is worth more points. Points are not lost for losing a match. After the conclusion of the fifth event, the top eight players in the standings will be invited to participate in the Grand Tour Playoffs to determine the winner of the season! Points are awarded as shown below.
Your total points for the season will be based solely on your 2 best tournament performances. This means that if you don't like a particular week's event, or are busy and can't make the tournament, you can skip a week without falling behind other players. For example, if you collect 5, 5, 3, and 2 points over four events while missing one event, you will have a total of 10 points at the end of the season (5 + 5).
Follow this link to view the standings of the ESOC Grand Tour Season 2!
Season 2 Schedule
Event 1 - June 9th, 2019 - $233 Underused Cup
Event 2 - June 23rd, 2019 - $306 Two Towns Tournament - Finals streamed on EscapeAoE
Event 3 - July 28th, 2019 - $220 Tri-Civ Cup
Event 4 - August 4th, 2019 - $200 Weekend Pilgrimage - Finals streamed on EscapeAoE
Event 5 - August 11th, 2019 - $220 Sup Cup #4
Season 2 Grand Tour Playoffs - October 7th to October 27th
Playoffs Format
At the end of the fifth event of the season, the top eight players in points will be asked to compete in the Single-Elimination Playoffs. All matches will be Best-of-7's, save for the Grand Finals, which will be a Best-of-9.
[spoiler=More info on Playoffs]The schedule will be as follows:
October 7th to October 13th /// Round of 8 (Bo7)
October 14th to October 20th /// Semi-Finals (Bo7)
October 21st to October 27th /// Finals (Bo9) and Bronze (Bo7)
The civilization-picking rules will be the same as the NWC rules. (Winner locks first in the next game, can't play a civilization again after you've won with it.)
Tournament seeding will be based off of the Grand Tour standings. For example, #1 in standings will face #8, #2 will face #7, and so on. In the case a player is not available to participate in the Playoffs, the seeding will shift upwards, as if the forfeited player's slot was removed.
Seeding will also play into the map pool. Each match will have a unique map pool according to the players' "region" in the bracket. The map pool assignments are as follows:
Kaiserklein vs Lukas_L99 - Northwest
Knuschelbär vs iamturk - Northeast
tabben vs Conquerer999 - Southwest
Mitoe vs SomppuKunkku - Southeast
Kaiser/Lukas vs Knusch/turk - North
tabben/Conq vs Mitoe/Somppu - South
There will be no map vetoes in the Playoffs. The map pool is as follows:
[/spoiler]The starting prize pool is $400. Half of all donations to ESOC during the month of October will go towards the prize pool, so be sure to support your favorite players! The prize distribution will be as follows:
1st Place: $200 - 50%
2nd Place: $100 - 25%
3rd Place: $60 - 15%
4th place: $40 - 10%
The winner of the playoffs will be crowned the Grand Tour Champion!
