As the ALGS treads water, we interviewed Sola Fide's Urban about the future of competitive Apex
This is The Final Circle, a newsletter for the competitive Apex community
Riot’s Valorant has announced plans for their 2021 competitive scene. So has PUBG Mobile, promising a $14 million prize pool next year—that’s more than four times the size of this year’s ALGS.
Competitive Apex could use a similar road-map for its 2021 season. Apex itself is doing great; Season 7 and its large publicity push have made November the game’s most popular month on Twitch since March of 2019, when it was brand-new.
But as we approach the conclusion of the Autumn Circuit, the competitive scene is treading water. People are asking what can be done to make competitive Apex more popular; more and more players seem to be focusing on content creation; poorly attended or cancelled events, like NA’s recently squashed Summit Series Week 6, get blamed on incompetent tournament organizers or lazy and undisciplined players.
I thought it might be a good time to look at the shape of the Apex pro circuit, its tournament formats, and how things might be improved next year—and with that in mind, I exchanged some DMs with Sola Fide’s Urban, the team’s coach and general manager. He’s spoken up recently about the competitive struggles in NA, his awful working conditions back when he was on the Team FiRE roster, and in general, is refreshingly candid about what goes on behind the scenes in esports. The following has been lightly edited for clarity.
The Final Circle: GLL’s Masters Summer took place over a period of many weeks, where teams that qualified for the final round ended up playing upwards of 60 games. ESA and Nerd Street are following a similar structure, with something like a ‘regular season’ leading up to a larger prize pool tourney in the ‘playoffs’. What do you think of more experimental format Lenovo Legion Royale format, where each game has its own prize pool paying down to third place?
Urban: Lenovo Legion’s format is definitely different. It's really hard to compare it to what I feel are more professional orientated events. Lenovo's one-off game format with placement only prizing feels more community orientated to allow more casual players the opportunity to compete and potentially win money. Where a typical tournament is structured with qualifiers, ALGS scoring, and multiple game series to act as a quality filters on the matches, Lenovo's direct to competition method offers less-experienced teams a better opportunity to compete for cash and the fact they are having sixty+ teams signing up with very minimal marketing shows they are doing something right.
The ALGS format in competitive Apex currently involves multi-day qualifiers, with 4-8 games in each qualifying round, narrowing the field down from sometimes hundreds of hopeful teams in each region. Is there a better way to do ALGS tourneys? What might that look like?
I think ALGS is in an awkward place right now, and speculating on different formats for it wouldn't be too productive as a whole. ALGS feels like a bastardized version of what competitive Apex should have been, obviously a direct result of COVID which I'm sure sent the EA competitive team into a complete scramble to offer the players a viable short-term alternative. While I feel ALGS's structure has made a rather large stride in QoL recently with their addition of the auto-qualification of the top ten teams, doing something similar for the bottom ten teams of grand finals could be potentially be beneficial.
Should funded teams (or those in partnership with the ALGS) be exempt from some or all qualifying rounds? Why or why not?
No. I think the program teams already have an distinct advantage over non-program teams. I don't feel comprising the competitive integrity to make the program is an appropriate move. If we look at North America for example, I believe there is only a single salaried roster outside of the program. The limited opportunity creates a divide in the scene, when some players have to split their time between competition and ensuring a roof remains over their head. While I'm not privy to the specifics of the program like what level of support they are actually offering, I'd love to see the program expand to both reward existing organizations that have been long invested into the game such as some of EU's teams like Lazarus and Third Impact, and to hopefully garner more interest to teams who were previously invested in the game such as SSG/G2/Fnatic.
When a team like NRG, for example, has a bad day and fails to qualify, is that just ‘on them’—or is there maybe some other way to quantify that their squad is, in fact, competitive with other top-tier teams—without a slog through low-level lobbies? Why not just invite teams to compete?
Truthfully, it's on the team. EA/Respawn has done an excellent job over the last year consistently enforcing their inclusive approach to competitive Apex. While I agree it’s unfortunate seeing teams who get upset early in a tournament whether from RNG or having an off-day, it's a necessary evil in competition.
Finally, to broaden this line of inquiry: Apex has developed a deeply interesting and highly strategic competitive style. Is it good for the health of the game? Why doesn’t Apex have a robust kill-race competitive scene? Is there a perception that competitive fans wouldn’t be interested in that kind of content?
To keep it simple: BR players are like cows. [Editor’s note: this is not a diss, but a reference to the popular belief that cows can be led up stairs, but not down them] Now, private lobbies are an obvious step-up from kill-races. You're just not getting that cow downstairs unless you force it. I think kill-races have a big place in more content orientated tournaments like Twitch Rivals, but as for Apex there is just no moving backwards.
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Twitch Rivals today!
It may surprise you to learn that a $50,000 prize pool tournament is on the schedule today, but Twitch Rivals: Bloodless Battle is set to pop off at 1 PM Pacific Standard Time.
This event pays every team who attends—down to 20th place—but it’s an invitational, so you had to be invited as a team captain or recruited to join a captain’s team. Interestingly, this tourney is using a previously unseen variation on the Match Point format:
ALGS #4 results
Finally, congrats to Complexity and Alliance for winning last week’s Autumn Circuit #4 in NA and EU respectively. Complexity in particular had a great day, with three wins in six games. Unpredictable rings and lots of edge fights certainly play to their strengths as a team. In EU, the competition was as close as ever—no team won more than one game, and Alliance had to clutch up with a 9 kill win in the final game to secure first place. The full results can be found here at Liquipedia.