I was able to sit down with the Game Manager for Cyber Evolution's newest supported game, Matt Wuthrich. With all the change occurring in the AA community, we will look to Matt to shed some light on the recent announcement of CEVO.

Thank you for taking the time to talk with me Matt, and can you give us a basic idea of what you have planned for this season?

First off I'm just going to say how weird this is being interviewed by my own site. For the first season of CEVO though, we’re planning two divisions: Amateur and Professional. NationVoice has come on board as our lead sponsor, allowing us to award $4,000 in cash and prizes, with $2,500 being dedicated to the Pro division. CEVO-P will house nine teams which, with eight weeks and one match per week, means each team will play every other team once and fairly with no repeat matches. Matches will be played on Wednesday night as well.

Will CEVO be using a roster cap?

No, I believe things will work themselves out naturally in terms of roster size. If a team wants to have a lot of players, we feel that’s up to them. However, we also believe that with a safe and secure event, the level of competition will make playing in CEVO a lot of fun, and rosters will manage themselves well as more people will actually want to play in CEVO as opposed to just being a backup.

How are the professional teams going to picked if there hasn't been an inaugural season?

The AA staff at CEVO has extended three auto-berth invitations for CEVO-P. The remaining six spots will be filled based on the results from a placement tournament. CEVO has found that holding a Professional Placement Tournament prior to each season is the fairest and most effective way of determining which teams make it in to that season’s Pro division. It also means that any team can make Pro as long as they do well enough to get invited to the tournament and then perform well in the tournament itself.

Normally, we would populate the tournament by inviting teams who did well in the Amateur division. However, since this is the first season, I am taking emails from now until the end of this week from potential pro teams would like to sign up for the Placement Tournament. If you would like to try and get your team in, email me mwuthrich@cevo.com. 16 teams total will be invited to the tournament. If more than 16 teams ask to be invited, 16 teams from the list will be chosen based on perceived skill level.

In subsequent seasons, the teams who are invited to the placement tournament will be based mostly off of performance in their last CEVO season. The top four teams in Pro will probably receive an auto-berth back into Season 2 of Pro, and the remaining five spots will be filled from that season’s Placement Tournament. If the tournament is again 16 teams, five would be filled from the bottom five teams in this season of CEVO-P, eight or nine would be invited from the top of CEVO-A, and the remaining few spots are reserved for wildcards.

So it’s very important to get started in CEVO right away if you aspire to play in CEVO-P. Even if you don’t make Pro this season, your chances of making it next season are far greater if you play in the Amateur division through this season.

Well then, when can teams expect to sign up for CEVO?

Registration is already open! If your team is interested in playing either CEVO-A or CEVO-P you should have your team sign up at www.cevo.com as soon as possible. The more teams that get fully registered and paid for, the sooner we can announce how deep our payouts will be for the Amateur division. We will be providing support on CEVO’s public Ventrilo (texas.cevo.nationvoice.com port 4000) to help users set up their paypal and the "ready up" check up section of the site.

The new CMN, can you give us any information about and what users should expect from it?

When CEVO CEO Charlie Plitt called to talk about an America’s Army event, one of my primary concerns was a proven, effective anti-cheat. AA has a few options out there, but through some private cheat connections we have established, we are pretty sure there are at least a couple cheats out there that bypass the current AC clients. Charlie assured me CEVO takes their cheat-detection very seriously, since players pay to play in CEVO. Well a few days later, we set up an extremely preliminary CMN test against a private AA cheat. We really didn't expect anything to happen considering the CMN had not even been configured for America's Army yet. Surprisingly, the CMN nailed the cheat and we were very impressed. A week later we are checking more and more cheats, both public and private, our confidence in CMN is growing tremendously.

Now the most important question, what is the money purse going to be?

As I mentioned earlier, we have received sponsorship from NationVoice, allowing us to guarantee a prize pot of $4,000 for this first season with $2,500 going to Pro. If turnout is good, we can hope for that prize pot to grow in subsequent seasons. I can't give real numbers on how much each place will get yet, because depth of payout depends on how many teams actually sign up. However, I can say we are currently expecting to pay out for first, second, and third place in CEVO-P, and from first down to fifth place in CEVO-A. As the team signups progress, we will be able to provide more information on exactly how the $4,000 prize pot will be split.

Well thank you very much for your time, do you have anything else you would like to add?

I’d like to thank NationVoice (www.nationvoice.com) for their sponsorship, Charlie Plitt, Eric Ping & the rest of CEVO for their support and rapid deployment of this America’s Army event, and of course GotFrag for taking the chance and supporting America's Army.

So good luck, have fun, don't cheat

Hopefully, CEVO will bring a whole new level to the AA competitive community. We will hopefully see many new teams starting to form to dip their feet into this new money league. CEVO will be the first pay to play league that America's Army will be able to participate in and this game has seen nothing but positive change with in the past few months.

With the Army Gaming Championship set to only last four (4) months, and CAL and TWL taking their usual time to setup new leagues each season spaced out by tournaments, the first season of CEVO can really make or break this game.

If this game continues to grow, the Devs will not be able to ignore our requests. CMN will also be an accepted change. This will be the second anti-cheat available to AA and we will be able to sit back and wait for which teams will not participate because of this.