Guides

A quick guide to seeding for Oceanink Series (Season 9)

Oceanink Squids

What is seeding?

Since the Oceanink Series splits teams into separate divisions based on registration numbers and skill, the admins require data on each team prior to the weekly matches to accurately place teams within divisions.

In this context, seeding is the admin process of sorting teams into skill-based divisions. All registered teams must participate in a seeding activity to provide data to ensure placement into the correct divisions. Inability to do so will result in disqualification.

Seeding Activities

All teams can participate in multiple seeding activities. Therefore, for the purposes of seeding, these activities are weighted.

In order of priority, the three options for seeding activities are:

  1. Official Series Seeding Tournaments
    • Series Seeding Tourney 1: Jan 15th (2PM AEDT) – register here
    • Series Seeding Tourney 2: Jan 21st (6PM AEDT) – register here
  2. Community-run tournaments that meet specific rules (seeding-eligible):
    • Cuddles Cup: Jan 7th (7PM AEDT) – register here
    • Reef Rushdown: Jan 14th (5PM AEDT) – register here
  3. Seeding scrims
    • Seeding scrim period: Jan 1st to 7PM AEDT Jan 22nd

If you participate in community-run tournaments or seeding scrims, you must submit the Seeding Activities Form by 7PM AEDT on Jan 22nd. The form is available here.

Season 9 Note: Both Official Series Seeding Tournaments are weighted equally. Cuddles Cup & Reef Rushdown are likely to be weighted similarly to each other if they have the same ratio of Oceanink Series roster teams.

Important Summary of Seeding Activities:

Official Series Seeding Tournaments: 

  • The main collection method for staff to collect seeding data
  • For accurate divisions, we require all teams to attempt to attend at least one official seeding tourney. There are always two in a season.
  • The format is optimised for data collection: a swiss bracket with a large pool and no top cut.
  • Note: Teams who have only participated in official seeding tournaments and no other seeding activities do not have to submit any further information regarding seeding.

Seeding-eligible tournaments: 

  • Conventional community-run tournaments whose results are approved for supplementary use in seeding. For Season 9 the approved tourneys are Cuddles Cup and Reef Rushdown.
  • Teams must play community-run tournaments with their Series roster for the results to count. If you use any substitute players in a tournament, it will not count towards your seeding.
  • These are a great source of supplementary data and a good safety net if a team is later unable to participate in an official seeding tourney. We encourage teams to participate in seeding-eligible tournaments.
  • If a team has only participated in a seeding-eligible tournament and no other seeding activities, they must validate their results by completing the Seeding Activities Form by Jan 22nd 7PM AEDT or face disqualification.

Seeding Scrim

  • Seeding scrims are team-organised scrims that can count towards seeding. 
  • Although seeding scrims are usually organised as a last resort to generate seeding data for unseeded teams, teams who have played in other seeding-related tournaments can use seeding scrims as supplementary data.
  • Requirements for a seeding scrim to be considered for seeding:
    • The approved maplist and format must be used (as seen in Oceanink Competitive discord)
    • At least one team must participate in an Official Series Seeding Tournament (which can be considered retrospectively)
    • The seeding scrim results must be:
      • Reported in the seeding scrims results channel and confirmed by both teams
      • Submitted to the Seeding Activities Form within 24 hours of the scrim
    • The results have to be validated via one of the following:
      • Submission of replay codes 
      • Be otherwise supervised by Series Staff.
    • Subsequently, a staff member’s confirmation on the validity of seeding scrim’s results must be obtained
  • If a team cannot participate in a seeding-related tourney, then they are required to submit the results of two valid seeding scrims by Jan 22nd 7PM AEDT or face disqualification. Series Staff will validate the results within 24 hours and confirm if they can be used in seeding.

Conclusion

For Series Staff, the ideal situation is if all teams could play in an Official Series Seeding Tournament. We understand this is not possible and therefore offer other options for teams to generate data for seeding purposes. 

However, these options are only possible because: 

  1. The majority of teams participate in official seeding tournaments
  2. Some teams participate in multiple seeding activities, allowing Series Staff to use them as valuable reference points between official seeding tournaments and seeding-eligible tournaments
  3. A few teams go out of their way to participate in seeding scrims to help seed other teams.

The more overlapping data we have, the more accurate division placements are. We appreciate our community’s tournament organisers who run events that are greatly useful during the seeding process. If your team has the availability and the energy, we encourage investing your time in playing community-run seeding-eligible tournaments alongside official seeding tournaments.