We will be particapating in the upcoming ESEA 50TH season!

- Blog ESEA post.

In Season 49, the ESEA League grew to its biggest ever with ~2,600 teams seeing how high they could climb our skill-balanced divisions on their path to ESL Pro League. Despite that incredible rise with North America Open growing by 50%, Season 49 also saw a significant experience improvement following the addition of automated CSTVs, with a 23% increase in participants rating their recommendation of League as 9/10 or 10/10 compared to Season 48.

Today we are excited to share that we’re kicking off registration for ESEA League Season 50 with a brand new feature and a number of improvements to tackle your top feedback including:

Get ready for Season 50 where:

Find your dream teammates with our Looking-For-Team Beta

Today, tens of millions play CS, millions watch esports events, but very few players actually compete in organised structures compared to any physical sport in the world. The main reason: it’s very difficult to find the right team that you will enjoy training, practicing and competing with. Today, 70–80% of players solo queue, which doesn’t help them start towards a competitive team for League. It is too hard to find like-minded players with the existing solutions and we want to start building better tools to make this easier.

When speaking to players in previous seasons, the biggest reason, by far, for removing teams that failed to register was that “they couldn’t find enough like-minded teammates”.

It can be a real struggle to find players who speak the same language, are of a similar skill level, and who have the same goals of progressing to compete in League which was why this was a top requested feature to move the recruitment section over from ESEA.net.

Today, we’re launching a new Looking-For-Team feature in Beta for Season 50 Open teams which you can access here. Find new teammates by browsing through the list of Open teams available, joining their parties, before organising practice to build chemistry and understand if you’re a good fit! Alternatively, incomplete Open teams with less than 5 players can first register for ESEA League Season 50 here before marking their team as “public” to be featured in our new Looking-for-Team Beta.

We have also created a team chat and voice channel at the top of your navigation bar where your team is automatically added. This will make it easier to quickly share links, coordinate practice times, for teams to answer any quick questions with new recruits.

Creating New Opportunities

ESEA League expanded years ago to Oceania, South America, Asia-Pacific, and South Africa continually awarding prize money, offering LAN qualification slots at global events, and providing consistent competitive opportunities to all regions. Last year, we completed the path from amateur to professional with promotion to ESL Pro League through ESL Challenger League divisions qualified from our Open division in Oceania, South America, and Asia-Pacific.

With the fantastic signups last season in some of our smaller regions, we want to continue to improve your experience with more balanced matches. In Season 50, we want to set a clear threshold of 70 teams in Open in any of these regions to unlock a new, higher division for Season 51. This will allow us to qualify Season 50 Open teams in those regions to ESL Challenger League but offer more balanced matches with three distinct divisions in Season 51. However, we have to set 70 teams as a significantly high liquidity to avoid next season a low number of teams reducing the impact of balancing per win rate in each division.

Smoothing the Registration Process

In previous seasons, getting your team ready for the end of registration or your match has been unnecessarily confusing. We want to make this easier to understand so to participate, a player simply needs to join the premade team and the captain can select the roster from the players available. This removes a tedious step where players needed to join the League team themselves after the premade team.

We have also redesigned how the roster is displayed on the League page to display all of the team’s information rather than having to click through multiple modals to manage the roster, promote players to captains, or swap roles. Each member will also clearly display an error if they are not eligible to participate, eg not having a game registered, missing a League Pass subscription, or if the team has not selected their conference yet. Teams will also be blocked from registering until the prior season has completed which will prevent situations where teams were not moved up because they registered early.

Empowering and Rewarding Community Champions

If you would be interested in earning FACEIT Points (to exchange for CS skins) by helping the next generation of players get signed up for ESEA League, message aluminati on discord! You will be issued with your own custom code and for each player that subscribes to League Pass, you will receive 7,200 FACEIT Points! Share your code on social media, in your Clan or Hub, or with your friends to earn rewards while supporting Counter-Strike esports. All Season 50 participants will also earn a Season 50 profile badge on their profile to show their support.

We’re also putting up $5,000 of CS skins for the community champions with the most players through their code will earn the following skins:

1st place: Butterfly Knife | Tiger Tooth (Factory New)
2nd place: M4A1-S | Hot Rod (Factory New)
3rd place: Butterfly Knife | Stained (Field-Tested) -
4th place: M4A1-S | Printstream (Minimal Wear)
5th place: Gut Knife | Tiger Tooth Factory New
6th place: Navaja Knife
7th place: StatTrak™ M4A1-S | Hyper Beast (Minimal Wear)
8th place: Desert Eagle | Printstream (Factory New)
9th place: AWP | Redline (Field-Tested)
10th place: AK-47 | Cartel (Factory New)

Putting Your Elo To The Test And Fast-Track To Higher Divisions

For stronger teams that are reforming or don’t already have a team in a higher division already, you can earn a spot by competing in the following Fast-Track qualifiers for Europe and North America:

The requirements are as follows for:

North America

Europe:

We are announcing these dates in good time so there’s still time to grind before the qualifiers begin. If your team has the eligible amount of Elo, please open an “ESEA” ticket here under the League section and state the following information. Our support team will then check each player’s Elo, and invite your team to the tournament:

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Thank you for 50 Seasons of ESEA League where we have awarded millions of Dollars and provided the next step for countless Counter-Strike players to take their next step in their path to becoming a professional. We can’t wait to see which teams will emerge out of our new Looking-For-Team and start their journey in ESEA League! Good luck in Season 50!