etc7

With OQs coming up for Kickoff, and who knows what else, I wanted to briefly talk to the community as a whole in NA on a few things related to tournaments, VLR, formats, and more for the remainder of the year and onward. For 2027 - I have no idea what this will look like for us and until I do, I can't make promises on what we will be able to do, how often, etc.. The priorities will always be on letting people play official events without conflict, so it all comes down to scheduling and when we can run events. For 2026 - There is a lot of things I have been wanting to do, and formats like DOUBLE//DOWN are one of them. Giving players more reps against better teams and truly making it feel rewarding to play the game and get better is what I have always wanted to do. GSL is a great base of a format but often creates too much imbalance and we have 32 team playoff brackets where a vast majority of RO32 matchups are heavily one sided yet still. This means for a lot of teams, your first 3 matches provide little to no value from a competitive standpoint. The issue with running new ideas and formats come 2-fold from the community: 1 - People use VLR to track themselves and their career in the game. People see it as the place to get scouted and be picked up to new teams, but the problem is that's really not the case anymore. Ranked leaderboards, tournaments, 10 mans, etc. mean more than a static number on a 3rd party website to coaches. The data there can help show people your depth and breadth as a player, but it's not the source of recruiting it once was, and I think for the better. People tend to only play events if they're guaranteed to get VLR stats for every match they play, and while we are fortunate enough to have a stacked competition weekly and our events meet VLRs criteria, it often means new ideas and formats don't always fit those and we don't know the full extent of the coverage. This has caused events without this "guaranteed" coverage to have reduced signup numbers, which makes operating the tournaments profitably hard to do. 2 - People don't like trying new things. Change can be scary, and for teams who are playing one of their first few events, spending money on something you dont know how it'll go is tough. I never want to make the process harder, or more than required raise the barrier to entry, but I also want to be able to do new and exciting things, while also keeping competition high and the value higher. Tournaments are hard to get right, we have followed a recipe thats worked for us and I am very grateful to have been able to stay in business all these years. I am curious on y'alls thoughts and opinions and what you would like to see more of / less of and how we can be better to get teams in the best spot they can be for what lay ahead.