Time to find out if there's a word limit
I survived overwatch and heavily followed the games tier 2 scene (I know I wasted a lot of my time) but here's what you need to make it work.
Tier 2 brings value to the scene in 2 ways
-It creates storyline and history for new talents entering the scene giving them brands and personality that's marketable to sponsors for either a VCT team or Val in general
-provides stability for upcoming players to persue the dream of playing in VCT
To create a history and brands you need to make story's worth giving a fuck about. You do this with event's and opportunities the break players from the tier 2 bubble into the main VCT audience. To do this you need events, not necessarily big ones with massive prise pools and financial investment. Think show matches with no stakes but high profile names against tier 2 teams. "VCT emea split 1 All-stars plays VCL split 1 winner Istanbul wildcats" so stakes, just exposure. But this also needs content surrounding it, invest money into produced content surrounding tier 2 teams e.g. "how M80 use breach on ascent to disrupt the meta" it's clicky, throw it on tik tok for the I pad babys brings attention to the tier 2 team and highlights a playstyle or prominent figure that fans will remember. To steal something that overwatch league actually did well this year press season to fill the gap of a long off season a bit run a pro-am VCT teams vs challengers teams. If a VCT team lose, great you have a story for the upcoming VCT season and hype for some tier 2 talent. If the VCT teams stomp then ohh well that's what's meant to happen, another great example of this was the Overwatch world cup which was hype as fuck but also created the story for so many of it's biggest tier 2 players (great off season tournament)
Stability for players is a lot harder to do achieve borderline impossible so here's some ideas.
- tier 2 should not have an off season, no matter what it is run some cheap events from riot /3rd party run events. As long as there's an open Qualifyer and the main event streams to the main VCT feeds it's all you need.
- events need to have budget set aside for direct VCT marketing that makes them more appealing to an org trying to sell to sponsors than a prize pool would be. Drop $1000 of the prize pool and allocate the budget to have every team get some form of product placement desk segment/brand activation on the main broadcast. Idk have a the guard from the guard ride a horse on a stick in a race against one a faze power wheels car driven by the head coach.
-Provide more to orgs than just a prize pool, sponsors pay the bills no prize pool winnings.
Also some easy stuff.
Combine the main emea VCL's into 1 league with cis and mena sperate that feed into one playoffs bracket for the each split. (Yeah its a pain to sell sponsors on because of how emea works, but at least you have decent product to sell).
Anyway here's my rough idea of a skeleton calendar to run:
Mid January,
VCL split 1 starts during VCT off season (online)
VCL playoffs into VCL VCT Pro-Am mid to late Feb (online like weekend event)
March
VCT starts split 1
VCL split 2 starts
VCL split 2 playoffs
VCT group stage ends
1 week gap
All starts show match vs VCL split 2 champs(online because it's cheaper maybe fly them in to lan) probably do this as the opening game of VCT playoffs and not before the finals
Late April
VCT split 1 playoffs
May
Masters 1
June
VCT split 2 starts
VCL split 3 starts
July
VCL playoffs
Late July
VCL split 3 champs vs VCT split 2 All-stars
VCT playoffs
August
Masters 2
Early September
Last chance qualifiers/world cup qualifiers
Early October champs
Off season start*
Mid November
world cup lan finals time 3 emea nations, 3 na nations, 3 apac nations and 1 China representative
December-January
*Red bull home ground, LATAM cup, summit invitational, (the good thing about a regional off season is a number of events can run at one time)
Discord