With the finals of the ESEA S6 LAN Playoffs & Finals having taken place only 2 weeks ago, the ESEA has announced that they have opened registration for the next season of their league. Registration will remain so until Monday August 23rd at 11:59pm EST.
There are several key changes from last season.
Key Changes From Season 6 to Season 7:
Increased prize pot from $50,000 to $56,550
Map rotations for each game will chosen by the community
Players banned for cheating in a non-league server will no longer result in matches being overturned
Increased number of League servers on new hardware to ease scheduling availability
With the announcement of season 7 also comes the announcement that everyone has been wondering about. ESEA has decided to drop support for the TF2 division unless 50 teams register for the Open league this season. The official announcement regarding this can be found below:
Lastly, as promised, we will be completely dropping all support for TF2 for Season 7, but there’s a catch. We’ve worked hard to address the many issues and suggestions TF2 players have had with our services including Client update response time (we’re down to an average of roughly 45 minutes), scrim servers (in public testing), as well as an Intermediate division. We’ve done our part, now it’s up to the community to man up, stop whining, and save TF2 on ESEA themselves. ESEA TF2 Season 7 will only happen if at least 50 TF2 Open teams are paid by the close of registration.
ESEA has also announced that they are removing the ESEA-Main Finals from the LAN schedule this season in order to raise the Invite division prize pots.