Season 7 Playoffs & Season 8 Preview

Ladies and Gentlesloths, the time has come. EU Season 7 Playoffs are nearly here, and we've got all the hot details for you. as well as a preview of some of the changes coming for Season 8!

Heroes Lounge Championship

Teams in division 1 and 2 will have the opportunity to participate in the premier championship of Heroes Lounge.
The top 10 teams from division 1 and top 6 teams from division 2 will qualify for Heroes Lounge Championship.

20th - 21st Oct

Heroes Lounge Cup

Heroes Lounge cup will feature teams from division 3, 4 and 5.
The top 6 from division 3, top  5 from division 4 and top 5 from division 5 will qualify for this prestigious cup.

13th - 14th Oct

The Dates

Narsha and Cosmic return with some special guests from the community, on the 30th of Sep at 20:00 CEST. Tune in to Heroes Lounge Twitch to see who will be the "group of death", if Narsha can find his tiny balls and just what terrible jokes are lined up! We will also have giveaways running throughout the event, including exclusive Heroes Lounge merch!

Format

Finals / Knockout Phase

Teams coming from the upper bracket will have 2 lives, where losing a match will move them to the lower bracket. Teams in the lower bracket will only have a single life where they have to win every series to stay in the tournament.
All matches are best of 3 (BO3), except the grand finals where it is a best of 5 (BO5) with the team coming in from the winner's bracket having map pick before map bans are chosen and also gets first pick on the map; there will be no one game advantage. This is based upon a format suggested by James Baker, that we have now been using for 2 seasons. Finals will run throughout the entire weekend and will be streamed on our lounge channels on Twitch.

You can also check out all the playoff rule changes on our handy playoffs rules page.  We hope to see you during the playoffs, cheering for your favorite Heroes Lounge teams!

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League Structure Changes

For the last few seasons, Heroes Lounge has seen it's biggest divisions be between 35-40 teams, and we have heard you feedback that they are too large, and agree. Starting with next season onwards, we will be increasing the amount of divisions. We are currently looking at increasing to 6 or 7, but this will depend on signups and the MMR spread of said signups.
With this change however, we are going to have to ignore legacy and promotion/demotion for this season, and reseed all teams as if new. We understand that there are some teams that have historically performed for multiple seasons either above or below their Team MMR, and as such we are going to be allowing teams to contest their seeding for this season if they are such a team. This can be done by contacting a mod in the week after seeding has been done, and we will then look at this on a case by case basis.

MMR Seeding Changes

One of the longest standing pieces of feedback we've had from people over the last few seasons, is that they would like us to seed by top 5 MMR. For this season, we are going to try a middle ground between our old way of seeding (average of entire team) and seeding only using the top 5 players. 

The way this will work, is for initial seeding, we will take 2 ratings from each team, both the entire team average, and just the top 5. We will then compare these 2 numbers, and if there is a large discrepancy between the 2, we will bump them up a division or more, as needed. We have run some simulations looking at this, and believe this will result in a fairer competition for all. Once initial seeding is done, the teams average will be calculated using the entire team as normal for purposes of adding new members etc.

Substitute Changes

For the past several seasons, we have had a rule of only allowing players to sub 4 times in any given season, and the feedback we have been given is that this is a little harsh. We don't want to allow unlimited subs, as team identity is very important to us, but we do think we can relax these rules somewhat. Starting with Season 8, any player will be allowed to sub a total of 6 times in a season, but a maximum of 3 times for any one team. We will be looking at how this works closely and reviewing it again for the next season.

In addition to this, we have heard the complaints that it is very difficult to find a sub in the lower divisions, especially Division 5. In light of this, we are going to be introducing an MMR buffer for subs in these lower divisions, the exact details of which will be released at a later date once we have finalised the new division structure. Our hope is that this will ensure more games are able to be played.

Playoff Changes

Obviously with the increase in amount of divisions, this will result in us needing to change our Playoff Structure. Whilst we are not ready to announce these changes, I can reveal the plans we have made will result in even more teams being able to take part in playoffs at the end of the season, something that has been requested of us for some time. Expect to see full details of Season 8 Playoffs announced alongside the new division structure.

NA Expansion

As you have likely noticed by now, we have had an influx of new faces joining our discord. This is due to our new program to launch Heroes Lounge in North America. I hope you will all join us in welcoming our NA brethren, teaching them the way of the sloth, how to spam Petman emotes and to ping CptRaynor.

This is by far the largest initiative Heroes Lounge has embarked upon since launch, and you may also have seen some changes happening with the management structure as a result of this. On behalf of the everyone involved, we want to thank you all for your patience and continued support, as we strive to make Heroes Lounge the very best it can be.