Around a year ago, we started playing games online out of necessity. Since then we have had four leagues, each increasing in size and scale. Season 5 starts in May, so I’ve taken this opportunity of a gap to try something out: an invitational tournament featuring the tops players based on their record in those leagues.

The purpose of this mini-tournament is twofold. First and foremost, it will be to put the Battle Realm format through its paces as a competitive format. There has been a bit of division in the community over whether it will be a good competitive format, but we are lacking real experience of it at high level competition, so let’s get some experience!

The secondary goal is to give content creators – especially streamers – good stuff to talk about between competitive seasons.

It’s hard to pick out who the top players are – we’ve got some great players around – so I had to come up with a system to rank them. There were two basic considerations: how well they did, and in which season.

Season 1 had over 5 times fewer players than season 4, so (without trying to take anything away from those that did well in early seasons) I’m weighting later seasons higher than earlier systems; the pool of players grew every season and this reflects that. That creates its own issues as does a top 4 finish in season 4 trump a losing finalist in season 3?

The system I devised isn’t perfect, but it did enable me to make an objective judgement based on it. So here is the matrix I devised:

There’s slight ambiguity around season 1: it was a very different format. The “finalist” is the player who lost in round 5 to the winner. The “top 4” are all the other 4-1 players. I didn’t actually award top 8 for season 1 or 2 due to how they were set up – season two only had the top of the four regional heats progress – but it’s there so you can see the patterns in the numbers and my thinking behind the values.

This weights performance higher than recency (and therefore pool size), and gives a minor bump to the actual winner, recognising that achievement, so the winner of any season trumps any single top 4 finish. It feels about right to me when I compare any two single results: finalist of season 3 scores more than top 4 of season 4. Winner of season 2 ranks the same as finalist in season 4 – which had twice as many players.

So using this, here are the players that made the top eight in total points:

1. Morgan Reid. Coming it the top 4 (or equivalent) every season is fantastic consistency, racking up 31 points.
2. Pat Dunford. Winning seasons 2 and 4 nets him 30 points, just behind Morgan.
3. Travis Foss. Good performance in seasons 1 and 3 and getting to the final of season 4 ends up with a total of 22 points.
4. Sooner. Winning season 1 and making top 4 of season 2 gives a total of 17 points.
5. Sploosh. Being a twice finalist accumulates 16 points.
6. Esmond. Winning season 3 puts him at 15 points.
7. Merzain. A top 4 finish in the biggest ever league equates to 10 points
8. UtilityCookie and Raptornest both finished top 4 in season 3 earning them 8 points. As there were only 8 spots I had to pick between them. They had the same record in season 4 (4-2), so it came down to randomisation, and UtilityCookie got the invite.

Rosters are due to be submitted in a few days (see them here when they are all in) and then the games will start. They are following a seeded bracket, as shown below:

Players will arrange a time that suits both and then we’ll try to find a streamer and commentary team that can make it.

Let the games begin!