The credibility of online matches has always been looked down upon as inferior and teams that thrive online are often not given the credit they may deserve. The major cause of this has been directed toward the fact that there aren't enough incentives to entice teams to prepare just as hard for online play as they would for a LAN. CEVO has introduced a new system it hopes will help improve this tarnished image of online matches.

CEVO’s system that will make it the first online league to award prize money for each match played, depending on a win or loss, rather than just handing out money to a single team for winning the championship game.

Although only applicable to the CEVO-P division of Counter-Strike 1.6, teams will now be awarded $100.00 for each match they win throughout the season.

Wayne Ferguson, Internal Communications and Publications Director for CEVO, addressed the "Online" issue and how this new system will be a method to combat and dissolve this stereotype.

"Firstly, we want to promote Online play as a legitimate format for competition. For too long, the community has used "Online" as an insult. The Online format offers many advantages over LAN play, especially convenience and comfort for players. You don't need to accommodate travel to play in CEVO. So it's one step towards making teams and the community care about Online play."

With this new system, CEVO will be attempting to help advance Online play, an area of eSports that has taken a backseat to the more common initiative of growing eSports by improving LAN events. As Ferguson states, there are many organizations involved in broadcasting and exposing online matches.

"We want to stabilize Professional matches. There are many organizations and fans with a vested interest in realiable match times. We, TsN, GotFrag, and many others, put a lot of effort into planning highlight matches."

Despite the fact that online matches aren't often as hyped up as large LAN events, he believes that many people do still tune in to watch them.

"Many fans arrange their schedules to watch the matches as well, in many cases, thousands of fans. That's a lot of people who have a vested interest in a specific match time. This new payment system gives us another avenue for encouraging teams to play on time and as scheduled."

The full press release from the CEVO Website can be found below.

Building Professionalism – CEVO-P Details

CEVO is continuously pursuing the development of professionalism in eSports. Today, we're excited to announce our latest contribution towards this goal.

For too long has Counter-Strike at its highest level been under controversy as to how much commitment is involved online, especially when teams are playing for money. After a somewhat disappointing last season, CEVO has decided to implement a few new changes in hopes to once again raise the bar and increase the respectability of online play.

Starting in Season 3, CEVO will be assigning a monetary value to each match, in which each team will be able to accumulate earnings throughout the season. The Professional pot has now been raised to $20,000 to compensate for this new format. The new prize pot will be allocated as follows:

· $10,000 allotted for regular season matches
· $10,000 allotted for the Grand Championship

The new format will award $100.00 cash for each regular season match won. These seasonal winnings will be added to the team’s pot, to be paid at the end of the event. This new format creates a constructive environment and provides immediate results. Even when a team doesn’t have an opportunity to make playoffs, they will have an opportunity to win cash for their performance.

Matches lost will simply result in no money won towards the team pot, however, matches forfeited, or failure to play upon a scheduled time will result in a loss of $100 from the teams’ pot. This means that any match won will be negated each time a team forfeits or does not show up within reasonable time for the match. If a team should enter a negative value in their team pot during any portion of the season, they will be removed from the event.

In other news, similar to last season, teams will have to schedule their matches with the CEVO Match scheduling system one (1) week in advance. With that, all CEVO-P matches have been scheduled up to week 7 to help teams schedule around other acceptable priorities.

There will be absolutely no exceptions for teams that fail to communicate with CEVO regarding a need for a reschedule at least 5 days before the match. Excuses regarding a missing player on match night and other similar reasons, will not be accepted.

With all that said, we hope everyone is looking forward to this CEVO-P season as much as we are. If any of the Professional teams have any issues or questions, please don't hesitate to contact CEVO|DiVito or CEVO|Pipher through IRC or e-mail.

Source : CEVO