Seeding is always going to be one of those areas of tournament operations where there are hundreds of opinions and it's certainly one that we've had our fair share of clashes with over our many years of running events. 

With community level events and high turnover of rosters, from an event organiser perspective it's really hard to get this right, and even when we do, we're never going to please everyone! 

But after epic31 we committed to try something different and make the process more transparent. So for next event we're going to create a seeding panel for each game with 4-8 community representatives involved with an open process to be a part of those panels. 

As always, our league operations team will prepare the initial wave of seeding based on various different ranking systems common to each of our four main titles, this will produce our first draft shortly after signups close at 16:00 25 February.  

The seeding panels will then review the drafts and make their suggestions for the top 4/8/16/32 depending on the size of the tournament. Each panel member's results will be submitted to the admin team, anonymised and merged in to the final order. The panel will also discuss any recent roster changes or tournament wins that may not be picked up by ranking systems. 

The seeding panel members may be event participants, but if they are, they will not be able to seed their teams and by having a larger panel, any attempts to manipulate that seeding will be averaged out by the remainder of the panel. The league operations team will ultimately still have the final say to manage any clashes of interest. 

Importantly, the makeup of the panel will be shared for full transparency. We've taken community opinions on board for the seeding for many years, but often people haven't wanted to put their names to that, which leads to assumptions that the whole process is being done without the detailed game scene knowledge. 

If you'd like to be a part of this, then please send us your details by 23:00 14 February. Note that the final seeding process will take place on the evening of Thursday 25 February once rosters have been locked for the event, so you'd need to be around in discord.gg/epiclan during that time.