2016 NA CS Summer Qualifiers Format

Think you’ve got what it takes to make it in the 2016 NA Challenger Series? Step up and take your shot in the Summer NA CS Open Qualifier. Signups are open from April 5-19 and we’ve added a partial seeding system to limit potential issues of random seeding.

Format

Just like in Spring, the Open Qualifier will consist of a single elimination, Best of 3 (Bo3) tournament, where the top two teams advance to the Qualifier Finals on May 25 against 5th and 6th seeds from 2016 NA CS Spring Split, Dream Team and Enemy, in Bo5 matches to claim spots in the 2016 NA CS Summer Split .

Signups open Tuesday, April 5 at midnight PT, and remain open until Tuesday, April 19 at 3 PM PT. Get your team together and visit Battlegrounds to register your team. The final bracket will be released one hour after signups close on April 19.

Seeding

While the Open Qualifier format will remain the same, we’re making a change to the way the bracket is seeded. In Spring, we used random seeding, which could potentially pit the best teams against each other in early rounds and guarantee that they knock each other out early.

For Summer, we’ve built a tiered random system that separates top-rated teams while still maintaining several of the improvements we introduced in Spring. Let’s break it down:

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1. When a team signs up, we log each player’s current Ranked tier.

2. A score is assigned to the teams based its five highest-rated players on the roster. Each Challenger player is worth 5, while each Diamond III is worth 1.

3. The top 8 teams become seeded, while the remaining teams remain unseeded.

4. The 8 seeded teams (Teams A-H in the above example) are randomly positioned on opposite ends of the bracket. This is the equivalent of where the 1st-8th ranked teams would be positioned in a standard seeded bracket.

5. The remaining teams are randomly distributed across the rest of the bracket.

A few notes on how the bracket works:

• This strictly weights tiers, so Diamond I 99 LP will be rated the same as Diamond I 0 LP.
• If less than 16 teams sign up, we’ll seed 4 teams instead of 8.
• If there’s a tie for the last spot, the team with the highest individual players takes the spot, so a team with 2 Challenger players would be rated above a tied team with 1 Challenger player.

We’ve used results from the previous Open Qualifiers to check this process. We looked specifically at the actual results of the tournament (who won, and who knocked out whom) and who looked the strongest on paper (teams with former LCS/CS players) to double-check our assumptions. 

We also want to be sure that the seeding process was transparent - we don’t want it to be subjective or hidden from the competitors. There’s no benefit from moving within the two tiers, only jumping the gap from 9th to 8th, so teams can focus on scrimming or playing Dynamic Queue as 5 as they see fit.

To set expectations and plan your benchmark, here’s the previous Top 8 in the 2016 CS Spring Qualifiers:

• 4 of the teams had 5 Challengers
• 3 of the teams had 3 Challengers and 2 Masters
• The last team had 3 Challengers, 1 Master, and 1 Diamond I

We hope that these changes will result in a more fair and competitive bracket. As always we will review at the end of the season to determine the effectiveness of these changes. 

How do I tune in?

Just like in Spring, you can follow the Open Qualifier Bracket and view detailed Match History on Battlegrounds. While we won’t be broadcasting the games ourselves, all matches are held on live and are free to be spectated and streamed by anyone up to the task.

We’ll be posting VODs of the Qualifier Finals on our YouTube channel on May 26. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to broadcast the Qualifier Finals live this split. While this is a bummer, our NA broadcast studio is going to be shut down during that time for some heavy maintenance to ensure that the new dual-stream NA LCS setup and a new CS desk is ready to rock for Summer Split.

For more information about the Open Qualifiers in Europe, head on over to their update here.