They'll actually be competing as ChampGG.8K with the same tag of 8K, so the Scizors will continue to live on.

The plugin doesn't do anything to interfere with player stats, so I'm not sure where the issue lies.

I'm reasonably certain that it's not CompCtrl breaking P-REC, but the usage of the new player ready system. You'd have to ask Valve and/or Orange to be certain.

Yes, the tournament restart will put it back to the ready up period and reset scores. Anything in progress will be lost.

From what I can tell, the plugin just starts off the bat no matter what, probably to allow it to be used even if you accidentally started the match with the regular configs. That's not really intuitive behavior, though, so I'll probably make a patch to execute a tournament restart while starting a match.

Pretty sure PugChamp is on RC2, but I will check.

Matches would only be scheduled within the conference, and for playoffs the top 16 (regardless of conference) would make playoffs with normal tiebreaker rules applied.

Probably wasn't made clear enough, but that only applies to the initial registration deadline - teams always have to be fully paid up within a day or two as part of a grace period (see items 1-3 on the league status thread).

Unrelated interesting notes: two conferences for Open for only the second time ever (first being Season 3) for some unknown reason, and a move back to the old scheduling system which should make for more competitive matches.

VAC bans were always meant to trigger automatic bans from the website, but the mechanism for actually doing so had been broken by an update to the authorization system a while back. Cheating of any kind should not be tolerated; thus, in all but a a very small cases, if you have been caught cheating by VAC you will not be allowed to play on PugChamp.

That being said, certain players with VAC bans can be allowed to play by admin discretion. If you do have a VAC ban and believe you should be allowed to play, contact a regional admin with your reasoning. If they are convinced, you can be manually whitelisted to bypass the automatic VAC check and thus be allowed to play - we have already done this in the past for one player and have just done this for a few others.

The issue appears to be fixed now. Let me know if you're still experiencing it - from what I can tell it was a backend website issue and not related to your browser configuration.

One last look for the upcoming season - still available and ready to play.

With 9 weeks in the Invite season, it's possible to just add another team and two games to the schedule for 18 games evenly spread out instead of the weird scheduling of 16 games there is now. There may be other reasons for having it this way (like some requirement to only have 16 games in the season), but who knows.

ESEA doesn't do promotion tournaments - it seems to be one of their core philosophies.

I've added the rosters here - let me know if there are any mistakes.

Not much testing and feedback when most people ban the map or loudly complain for it to be removed.

We are not planning to add any sort of votes in the in the near future due to a whole mess of problems that would result. The adjustments that we're considering right now are between removing windiff or increasing windiff to 3, with the latter admittedly fitting more with the reason we added the windiffs in the first place.

Nothing's been decided yet as the focus is to get all of the services stable.