It's a new year, and a new Monthly Cup. Read on for more information about the big tournament this weekend, and also about some important changes we'll be making to Monthly Cups from now on.

Monthly Cup this weekend

The first $3300 Monthly Cup of 2017 is taking place tomorrow:

• Saturday, January 7th at 16:00 CET.[/*]

See the brackets below:

Sixteen countries total will be represented, by number of players:

• France: 7[/*]
• Canada, Germany: 4[/*]
• Finland, Russia, UK, USA: 2[/*]
• Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland: 1[/*]

Who do you think will win?

Will Modgnik win his third straight Monthly Cup in a row, and buy a new parrot?

Make sure to watch one of the following streams this weekend to be eligible win prizes! Click here to find out how you can win gold, Eggs, and more.

• https://www.twitch.tv/FaeriaTV (English)[/*]
• https://www.twitch.tv/GoFaeria (French)[/*]
• https://www.twitch.tv/noaphiel (German)[/*]
• https://www.twitch.tv/liricohs (Spanish)[/*]

Note: Watching more than one stream at once does not increase your chances to win prizes.

Eggs are hatching again!

Whenever the Monthly Cup rolls around, Eggs just can't handle it: They hatch.While our scientists are still working on figuring out exactly what it is about the Monthly Cup that makes the Eggs hatch, we've put together all the information you need about Eggs in one helpful post.

• Click here for everything you need to know about Eggs, where to get them, and how to hatch them [/*]

Monthly Cup changes

With the new year will come some changes to the Monthly Cups in general. There is, of course, a lot of feedback centered around all aspects of our competitive scene - and we appreciate that. With all of that feedback and a half a year's worth of Monthly Cups behind us already, we've decided to make the following changes that will be effective immediately starting next cup.

• Our four special guests will now be the top four from the previous Monthly Cup.[/*]

It has been a standard for some time to invite the previous first and second placements to the next Monthly Cup - but we will now be extending that invitation to the third and fourth place finishers as well. Not only does this give even greater incentive to finish in the top four, it allows more champions to continually return with favored seeding and open themselves up to any challenger, every month.

Note: While this is the plan for the immediate future, we may at some point reserve the 3rd and 4th slots again for externally invited, special guests. If this does happen again, we will make it very clear before any Monthly Cup that this will be the case.

• Voted slots decreased from 4 to 2.[/*]
• Top 8 ranked slots increased to Top 10[/*]

We recognize the fact that possibly the most difficult way to qualify for the Monthly Cup is through high ranked ladder placements. Therefore, we want to expand this selection just a bit by sacrificing 2 slots from the community voting area.

At the same time, we also want to make the voting process a little more interesting. Our first step in this area will be providing a new way for players to submit "campaign posts" to our official forums, where they can make a brief appeal to players about why they should vote for them.

• Introducing: Campaign posts[/*]

In an effort to make the voting competition more interesting, there will be a brand new section on our forums titled "Monthly Cup Campaign posts" where you may try your best to convince others to vote for you. You may do this with images, text, or a combination of both!

After you've submitted your post, we will link it to the actual voting page where you will be able to click next to each name and view their campaign.

We feel this will give more life to the voting process and provide more information than just a name to those who are casting their vote.

• Create your campaign post here [/*]

While voting will not open until after the Monthly Cup this Saturday, we have opened the forum section above if you'd like a head start in creating your post.

• Increasing from 12 locked in bracket seeds to 16, based on Rank[/*]

If you're not familiar with how tournament seeding works or are simply not interested, read no further! This mainly affects competitors.

Previously, we have had 12 seeds available, with the top 4 going to special invitees and next 8 given based on ranking at end of season. We'll simply be adding 4 more seeds after that, totaling 16, meaning bracket seeding will now look like this:

• 1: Invited Guest #1 (Winner of previous cup, $150 Krog's Bounty)[/*]
• 2: Invited Guest #2 (2nd place of previous cup, $150 Krog's Bounty)[/*]
• 3: Invited Guest #3 (3rd place of previous cup)[/*]
• 4: Invited Guest #4 (4th place of previous cup)[/*]
• 5-16: Highest 12 God ranks of all remaining qualified players, in order.[/*]
• 13-32: Randomized.[/*]

In this way, every match in the Round of 32 will contain one seeded player.

Thanks for reading, and see you this weekend!

• Gary(@Atmaz )[/*]

[ 2017-01-06 19:33:54 CET ] [Original Post]