Category: Ranking Battle

CouchWarriors League Schedule: November

A new month in the CouchWarriors League brings fresh opportunities to score ranking points in your favourite games. Here are the dates and sign-up links for all our November ranbats and CWL Online events across Victoria, Queensland and South Australia.

You can get all this event information delivered by Twitter or email if you subscribe to our new Revue newsletter!

You can also send us your highlights, photos and stream links on Discord, Facebook or Twitter – help us share your favourite tournament moments with the rest of the AUS FGC!

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CouchWarriors League Schedule Update: October Ranbats, Adelaide Mini-Major Announced!

October Event Calendar

A new month in the CouchWarriors League brings fresh opportunities to score ranking points in your favourite games. Here are the dates and sign-up links for all our October ranbats and CWL Online events – plus, a new mini-major presented by CouchWarriors SA!

Remember, you can have event information emailed to you every month by subscribing to our newsletter! You can also send us your highlights, photos and stream links – help us share your favourite tournament moments with the rest of the AUS FGC!

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GG:Strive Joins CWL Online With First Interstate Showdown

When we write fighting game history, 2021 is going to go down as the Year of Gear. The bold presentation and fortuitous timing of Guilty Gear: Strive has brought the hard-rocking franchise from the fringe of the FGC into the mainstream. And the willingness of Arc System Works to remodel some aspects of the core system has invited many new Guilty Gear players to make Strive their entry point, mixing it up with anime veterans on more even footing. 

With all that momentum it was inevitable that GG:ST would make it onto the CouchWarriors League circuit as our newest featured title. Last month’s Battle Arena Nightclub was the first opportunity for players to pick up ranking points on the Strive leaderboard. But even that clash of Melbourne’s finest turned out to just be an appetizer for August’s CWL Online event – the first real chance to see who could stand supreme in this new game at the national level.

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CouchWarriors League New Points System Aug 2021

If you ask the question, “why are the CouchWarriors events all called Ranbats?”  It’s short for Ranking Battle – a long standing tradition in the community, offering players an incentive to compare their progress and get ever stronger! Today we’re announcing an update to the point system to make it more inclusive of players of all levels.

Of course, all our Ranking Battle live events are not just about tournaments, they’re perhaps moreso about socialising, casual matches and even long sets, with a great opportunity to learn and improve.

By also having tournaments this adds some goals and structure for a day’s play – and the point system is part of that. Tying all our offline and online events together via the points is CouchWarriors League – the league ladder tracks each game and region, which you can filter here on the website. This has been a great way to determine seeding and invitations for events, and prize rewards.

Now as we dive into the 2nd half of this year’s season under CouchWarriors League, we’ve updated the system, in consultation with the tournament teams.Lets take a look:

What’s new and why do we like it?

  • Expands the point system down to all participants, not just top 4-8
  • This means participation is encouraged for those who think they can’t place, they can build up a small base of points just by entering consistently.
  • We have kept the weighting towards offline tournaments vs online, however all points totals are increased, so if you play consistently, even online, you have a chance to post a good score
  • This provides a nice second split/half season boost as we go towards finals. We won’t reset the points completely, but it provides an effective reset for those actively playing thanks to the increase.
  • Still acknowledges season 1 players who get a kick start, recognizing due to COVID, its been an uneven year for live events.
  • The system gives more scope for flexibility in determining prizes and finals seeding.

The point system will be in effect from July events onwards! Yes, that means you can earn more points for playing any of the current tournaments! Register here

Rewards

We recognise this year has been uneven due to Covid, so some regions may have more events than others. This is why we will award end of season prizes to the top players in every game – in each region.

So if you’re the best player in a feature title in your state, or online, which is treated as its own region, you’ll be rewarded!

Current online feature titles are Street Fighter V, Guilty Gear Strive, Tekken 7 and Super Smash Bros Ultimate.  These run monthly, so there’s a tournament each week and a prize will be allocated each month.

An additional two titles, while not guaranteed to run an online tournament each month, are staples of offline and will also have an end of season prize: Dragon Ball FighterZ and Super Smash Bros Melee.

Prizes are to be announced as the season progresses. You can count on support from our excellent sponsors Astro and Mwave for starters.

Regular titles you find at your local ranbat are all tracked in the points system, and at minimum we will add rewards at the finals.

Finals

On finals we will be planning to conclude the CWLeague season at CWC – CouchWarriors Crossup – in December with a boosted prize pool and more, to be announced.

If it is impossible for us to run a live finals event, we will run an online invitational using the league ladder. Last year there were over $5,000 in prizes and we are aiming high for this year.  We will have more to share on this soon, but rest assured those points are worth striving for!

CouchWarriors League Recap – May 2021

The fires of competition have burned more brightly than ever before across the CouchWarriors League, as we count down the days before the long-awaited BAM12 major. The month of May set a new all-time record for most ranking points on offer, impacting the race across all five CWL games.

In the past, the league rankings have often been dominated by a handful of regional champions who can reliably scoop their local tournament every time – but 2021 is looking different. Not only have we seen a few instances of top players traveling interstate to play spoiler for one event, but almost every game and region is seeing a more even spread of winners as the months roll on. It’s been the perfect way to foreshadow the inevitable clash for bragging rights we’ll see at BAM.

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CWL November Report – SFV

This strange, abbreviated but intense 14-event season of CouchWarriors League SFV came to a head on Saturday with the final CWL Online for the year. Doubled ranking points meant stakes were high, with the ladderboard leaders desperately holding onto the cash bounties attached to their top 3 spots. Even those well outside the top 3 were playing for keeps, since reaching the Grand Final here would be enough to earn another shot at the money in next month’s Season Finale. The competition has been fierce all year long, but now the finals atmosphere was palpable as players busted out pocket picks and some elite ringers showed up to snare qualification.

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CWL October Report – Smash Ultimate

Another weekend has passed, and the last CWL Online event for the month is in the books. With only one more event left on the schedule for each game, October represented the last real chance for any new names to show up and make a tilt at qualification for the Season Finale. Players whose qualification was already locked in were still there at full force as they battled tooth and nail for top placegetter payouts.

This weekend also saw a bit of league rules weirdness, as players in the South Australian scene seemed like they might have grabbed an extra chance at those prizes. Capitalizing on their relative freedom from COVID-19, the locals took this chance to finally restart their “Cheese League” ranbat series, which in an ideal season would have been the main way for SA players to earn their CWL points. 

While it’s a terrific sign that we have players getting back into offline play, CouchWarriors quickly clarified that there were no extra points suddenly up for grabs as a result – to be fair to players in other states, it would still be CWL Online or bust!

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CWL October Report – SFV & Melee

The 2020 CouchWarriors League is well onto the home stretch, and halfway through October competition we can really see who is pulling ahead among the top contenders for each game.

Both the Street Fighter bracket on the 3rd and the Melee competition on the tenth pulled 24 attendees, giving us short but extremely fierce tournaments. It seems like after the initial boom of contenders entering following the double-points announcement, we have once again crunched the numbers down to just those players with the most points, or the most self-confidence. Read more

CWL September Report – Smash Ultimate

Things have been heating up in Australia’s fighting game community all month, and it’s not just good spring weather. Tournament registrations are up, prize pools have been raised, and even in embattled Victoria there are signs that coronavirus is slowly receding – giving us hope of holding CouchWarriors League events in person next season.

This excited atmosphere was heightened further in the Smash Ultimate scene, as the successful Cospendium Open series decided to merge its remaining event schedule with existing CWL monthlies. With the stakes having risen twice already since August, it’s no surprise that this weekend’s Ultimate tournament was even more hotly contested than the last one.

The quality of competition improved as well; there were plenty of ranked names among the 125 who entered. Yet again, we enjoyed seeing proven winners clash with the brigade of fierce, up-and-coming competitors who have made their own names during this year’s online tournament blitz. And quite often it was the latter who triumphed!

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CWL September Report – Tekken

As we covered in our last report, the leaderboards for the inaugural CouchWarriors League had been shaken up by the announcement this year’s remaining tournaments would offer double ranking points. The Tekken 7 race was already close; now it was virtually open season.

Despite the heightened stakes – further amplified by this event’s inclusion under the official PAX Online banner – the spike in registration witnessed in other CWL Online events this month didn’t materialize. This bracket saw a bump in quality rather than quantity – Naveed “Kanga|Chand NY” Iqbal signing up for his first CWL Online event of the season, while “Moose” from SA entered for the first time since April. Two of the very best in the nation, the double points incentive had finally forced them to pick up the sticks again in defense of their leaderboard rankings.

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