I plan to resurrect the idea of a planetary gearing league I've had a while back (https://gunsoficarus.com/community/forum/index.php/topic,1796.msg31831.html#msg31831) to fill the Sunday slot, which is currently not used by GoIs competitive scene.
I've designed this League with the Sunday evening slot and a casual spirit in mind. In my opinion one of the major flaws of the Sunday Rumble was its duration which has been especially problematic for European clans like ours, as Sunday rumbles could very well last until midnight and beyond, which kind of sucks if you need to get up early on Monday. Also I personally consider it quite exhausting to play more than two BO3-encounters in a row which has not been unlikely in Sunday Rumbles.
So I thought about how to organize a GoI-Sunday evening which doesn't require too much time-dedication by the players. The result is a concept which allows all participants to have a guaranteed single scrim within a league. Due to the parallel execution of two encounters in series, it's likely that full clan crews will be around before and/or after your league encounter. This provides a good environment to get either additional scrims (outside the league) started or to play semi-public high level lobbies if you want to. Alternatively you could just call it a day.
Overall the league is designed in a more casual spirit than the previously executed cog-series or the planned and cancelled 3rd series. It allows easy drop ins and outs for teams who just want to enjoy a scrim on a sunday afternoon while providing a system which rewards commitment and on-going success for those who want to take the league more seriously and participate in it on a regular basis.
Cogs in a nutshell
The goal of the league is to match participating teams with other teams of similar strength on a weekly basis. Furthermore the league shall be easily accessible for new teams at any given point of time and it shall encourage teams to participate in the leagues events on a regular basis. Players shall not have dedicate more than 2 hours of their spare time to participate in a league-event.
All teams participating in the League are associated with a slot in the planetary gearing which are indicated by a Letter and a Number in the picture below. In Cog-Events teams which are associated with adjected gear-sections (e.g. C1 and B2) are matched for best-of-three-encounters. If the challenger of an encounter wins, the encounters teams positions in the cogs standings are swapped. Otherwise the positions are kept. At the end of an Cog-Event the gears are turned and points are granted to All teams according to their standings (see the table below). The team which accumulates most points during a season, which lasts 12 events, wins the season.
(http://i.imgur.com/k1UvBNJ.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/sNwP0RI.png)
Organization
The Cog-Events take place each sunday (afternoon for the US, evening for the EU). Which teams which face each other at which time and on what maps will be announced one day prior to each event.
The event organization requires at least 4 voluntary referees per event who watch the matches. Referees can be changed from event to event. potential referees and (hopefully) streamers can sign up (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KvVTiATsvmCZP31S2cKBeCRDxt-zA2n_6dedwOKpKO8/edit?usp=sharing) to watch encounters and are assigned to encounters one day prior to an event.
Rules
Rules! (https://docs.google.com/document/d/180jODDW_9qNnHosYG2I5GurWZl_0h13fRTrOigwT9JI/edit?
usp=sharing)
An ongoing League
The League is designed as an ongoing event rather than Tournament with a defined start and end date.
While I could possibly see this league format being executed with a start and end date like the Sky-League, Aerodrome or soon the Hephaestus-League, I don't think it fits the concept. This would be problematic due to 2 major flaws my league-concept has that other leagues don't have. The initial seeding has a severe impact on the outcome of the League and the League-outcome can be decided before the end of the League. If this league was executed in a similar way as previous ones an execution of a fair and probably rather time-consuming qualification-phase would be mandatory. After the qualification phase ended, a team with a low seed wouldn't have much more than a theoretical chance to win the season or even just be among the top 3 teams at the end of the season.
Hence I'd much rather like to see this Concept being executed as an ongoing league with relatively brief seasons (6-8 weeks) which connect seamlessly. Feel like playing competitive out of the sudden? - Join mid season! - you probably won't win it anymore, but you can work yourself into a good starting position for the next one.