Prestige Rankings

We are pleased to announce our trial event for Company of Heroes 3, called Operation Clash! The event has been a long time coming - we have been waiting for the right moment to enter the scene. This is it! Sign-Ups On September 23rd and 24th, you have the opportunity to compete for glory and win your portion of the six-hundred USD starting prize pool. To participate, sign up via the Meta Plays Discord by September 22nd, 10 PM GMT. Check-in begins at 1:00 PM GMT, start time is at 1:30 PM GMT. Format & Rules Single elimination Bo 3 series Maps (picked by staff, subject to change): Road to Tunis Twin Beaches Faymonville ML Edition Crossroads Kasserine Pass Save your replays Conduct yourself professionally: be on time, and treat fellow players, casters and our staff with respect Additional, detailed rules are coming soon. How to Watch Day 1: Olvadi will be casting from the Meta Plays Twitch channel beginning at 2:30 PM GMT. Day 2: Greyshot and Stormless will cover the finals, starting at 2:30 PM GMT on the Meta Plays Twitch channel. Looking to cast? We'd love to have you participate via your channel! Please get in touch with @Olvadi for approval. Giveaways Relic Entertainment have been kind enough to offer some Steam game keys to give away - we truly appreciate the opportunity, thank you! During the live streams, you will have the chance to win these. Sounds great for our existing viewers especially, who may not own these yet! The full list is: 5x Company of Heroes 3 Keys 3x Company of Heroes Franchise Keys (1+2+DLC) 3x Dawn of War Franchise Keys (1+2+3+DLC) Looking to contribute? With the help of the incredibly helpful community members Greyshot and Curahee, we are putting down $600 towards the starting prize pool of the event. You can help further increase via our donation page, earning you guaranteed crediting, as well as shiny profile medals, in addition to our eternal gratitude. About Meta Plays and CoH 3 To those of you hearing of us for the first time, we are an esports organization with a community focus for multiple RTS games - chiefly Age of Mythology and Halo Wars 2. We have distributed over $16,000 in event prizes across all our supported games, present and past since our launch in 2021. This has been possible in huge part thanks to the community's generous contributions to event prize pools. With Company of Heroes 3, we are aiming for a similar setup, where we fund a base line of prize pools across events, that the community can then further elevate. We will be closely monitoring the performance of the event in order to decide about whether to commit to Company of Heroes 3 in the long term. To be crystal clear, we are certainly interested, but it needs to make economical sense for us to take on the extra costs. The metrics we will look at to judge the event's performance will include: Average viewership and follower growth on Twitch Average viewership, subscriber growth and watch time on YouTube Number of tournament participants (excluding no-shows) Prize pool donations Community support revenue (website subscriptions, staff tips, Twitch revenue, etc) Discord server growth Depending on the results we will scale our support for the game between the below. We humbly request that you let your friends know that they can help bring more esports events to CoH 3 by simply tuning in! No support: if our event completely misses the mark, we cannot commit to anything Small scale support: a singular open league tier, mostly aimed at pro players Medium scale support: 3 tiered leagues for amateur, rising star and pro players Full scale support: Regular showmatches, plus 3 tiered leagues for amateur, rising star and pro players Note: the above implies that we would implement CoH 3 to make use of our first party tournament hosting and seasonal ladder system, as well as showmatch system. This will take significant development effort, which is why we need to be certain that committing is the right call for us to make. Thank you very much for reading. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments, or reach us on Discord! We'll see you on the battlefield.

Finances - Report for 2022 We decided to start publicly sharing the overall project finances starting now, with the results of last year. The 2022 data is a baseline to compare ourselves against - it was the first complete calendar year of Meta Plays activity. This was still a time where we took major risks and explored unviable spaces like Age of Empires 4 and SpellForce 3, where we were unable to create revenue from the content itself. The majority of income (60%) has been event contributions - of which naturally 100% went directly into the prize pool, offsetting the expenses. Naturally, double expenses compared to income is not a sustainable situation long term, and we will be looking for that gap to be closed over 2023. This is all expected however, considering that we are still developing the website, as well as that new games were not expected to carry their own weight as much as Age of Mythology and Halo Wars 2. Finances - Projection for 2023 The first half of 2023 has already passed, so we have fairly good data to project how 2023 will go if we make no changes. The below charts are the worst case scenario that could happen at the end of the year - we are taking many steps to avoid the stagnant outcomes we project here. With development still being active, turning a profit is not expected, but we will need to close the gap between expenses and income further. Notable positives: Subscription revenue has increased, and optimistically we can project to reach over $1000 for 2023. Thank you very much for the support, this is great progress! We project a 70% increase year over year. Tipping revenue has increased, with an optimistic projection of $400 for 2023. Thanks to your help, we can offer our staff fair payment for their hard work. We project a 40% increase year over year. YouTube revenue has drastically increased, considering that we were not yet monetized in the first half of 2022. We appreciate your viewership, and would encourage more of you to subscribe, as this is the highest quality version of our content (1440p, high bitrate, edited without breaks). We project a massive 200% increase year over year. Twitch revenue has also drastically increased. This stems largely from a larger focus on our core games, Age of Mythology and Halo Wars 2, higher viewership, and most importantly, your support! We project a massive 175% increase year over year. We have also committed more to sponsorships in 2023 so far. After our short break, we will be continuing down this path, and would like to ask for your support and patience in this area, as it's one of our major revenue streams that makes the project possible. We project a 65% increase year over year. Halo Wars 2 prize pool contributions from the community have also increased. Thank you all for your support on this front! This increases the earnings of players, and makes them train harder. We project an increase of up to 70% year over year. The bad news: Unfortunately, this is where the good news end. We have been facing greater costs due to the nature of scaling up the project, such as via more video editing and art required, as well as inflation-induced cost increases. These were not really avoidable, but thanks to our 2 game focus from this point forward, we can expect a slightly more optimistic result than in the charts. Reducing Age of Mythology budget: The greatest negative thus far though is the drop in prize contributions for Age of Mythology. We project a drop of more than 50% year over year. We were expecting to continue the great momentum with Age of Mythology, and so have increased our budget for our leagues this year, but doing so has completely stopped community contributions since our Wisdom of Thoth League was announced. We are not going to be able to maintain doubling our prize pools compared to before, especially if it means that the community contributions stop - it makes no sense for us to do so, considering that the net result for players is the same. We must rely on the community to push our events to the next level. The exact adjustment is to be announced, however we need to make the decision to reduce our Age of Mythology budget until Retold is released. On Retold, we will start out strong to create some great initial competition, but will still be looking towards the community to aid our longevity. Reducing Staffing Budget: Staffing cost has increased this year due to greater revenue in general, as well as due to equipment needs. We project an increase of 33% year over year. Looking at our percentile stagnation when looking at totals (which result in a decline in absolute values), we will need to make an adjustment on this front so as to increase the project's viability. As the current season ends, our current casters will be offered a content partner or moderator position. Future event coverage will be held with optional, invited guest casters, which will be a networking-based slot, as we currently cannot afford paying for this. As we grow and turn profitable, in the long term, we will revisit this stance. Eliminating development costs in 2024: While we are committed to developing the proposed Tier ladder system, as you can see from our charts, development is one of the major cost components of the project. As this work is completed, feature-wise we aim to go into maintenance mode, at least until we turn profitable. We will also consider having a development-related subscription goal. More on this later. Subscription System Updates Our website subscription system is one of our most important revenue streams, seeing as no third party takes a cut (Twitch takes 50%, YouTube takes 30%). This makes our website subscribers our most valued supporters. We want to make sure that you are satisfied with the benefits and that you see them as worthwhile, so we have made some adjustments: All tiers now feature voting rights regarding our events. We will offer several options to subscribers for voting, such as about rule sets, formats and event art themes. Tier 4 and above gets double power. Tier 3 and above now gain ad-hoc game key giveaways. We have updated our goals: We added monthly showmatches for each game. This will unlock once we reach $200/month. We added a mystery goal at the end ($500/month). We have some ideas, and will offer subscribers a chance to vote. Once the mystery goal is unlocked, we will start a second tier of goals. We removed the PayPal fee coverage goal. This was a boring goal. We will stop covering prize pool contribution fees to help the project's finances. See the full current list here: Staffing Update: With us moving away from dedicated casters, we also have decided that this is a good time to review how we function when it comes to management. Going forward, we will have the following roles at Meta Plays: Project Director: Owner of Meta Plays. Handles finances, such as planning, pay-outs or sponsor interaction. Handles development management and decision making. Responsible for coverage of key events. Creates announcement articles. Creates tournament and showmatch listings. Responds to comments across social media. Manages content partner program. Project Manager: Contractor. Recruits and assigns moderators to chat and score reporting management. Collects community feedback. Manages unban requests and internal decision making around them. Syncs with Media Manager about upcoming events and key news. Resolves disputes. Community Manager: Contractor. Handles all matters related to the game they are dedicated to. Must be a well-connected member of the community. Manages tournaments and is in charge of rule enforcement and dispute handling. Directly invites players and content creators to participate in individual events. Directly engages with the community, turning chats into conversations. Encourages the community to share feedback, guides and more. Media Manager: Contractor. Video editor for YouTube purposes. Responsible for social media, sharing events and updates. Developer: Contractor. Working on website features, streaming tools, or art assets. Moderator: Volunteer position. Keeps chat/comment sections clean, handling time-outs and bans together with the other mods and Project Manager. Enters scores in tournaments and showmatches. Approves or rejects reports in the Tier Ladder. Currently we are looking for moderators to join our project. Feel free to apply here, or send a message to @Olvadi or myself directly.

Hey all, We wanted to provide a project update summarizing recent changes we have made, as well as a look into the future. Tournament and Showmatch Medals in Profile While before we used a separate profile page for your tournament stats, we have put in some effort to integrate the medals and tournament ladder rank cards into the main website profile. We have also defaulted to the "overall" setting, which shows your lifetime ranks and medals, rather than just 1 season at a time. The tournaments and Showmatches tabs will only appear on those players' profiles that have participated in our events. This makes the profiles a lot more linkable and interactable, while also providing better SEO. We hope you enjoy this update! Our Struggles with Halo Wars 2 Sign Ups We have recently shared a VLOG on YouTube about our struggles with especially the Halo Wars 2 pro league, where we would receive insufficient sign ups, in strong contrast to Age of Mythology, where a high number of players want to play. The feedback was overwhelmingly leaning in one direction - players want skill-based segregation, more than what we have been offering. Essentially we need something between our Amateur and Pro Leagues - perhaps a "Rising Star League" (feel free to suggest names). This isn't particularly simple to set up, and to ensure that we can make fair decisions about who belongs to which skill bracket, we must develop a system that makes these decisions 100% objective, as opposed to relying on personal decisions by our team (which can easily become sources of frustration). While the above is mostly a Halo Wars 2 problem, we could see our solution move Age of Mythology in a positive direction, too. What is the Tier Ladder? With all this in mind, we would like to propose the Tier Ladder (working name, we are open to suggestions): Players with a Meta Plays account will be able to sign up to a ladder A moderator will determine an initial placement. This can be based on a recent tournament and showmatch result, if available. If the player is not known, a showmatch/duel will be arranged by mods. The tier range will determine which league you will be allowed to participate in: S tier - Pro League players A tier - top Rising Star League players B tier - contending Rising Star League players C tier - new Rising Star League players D tier - top Amateur League players E tier - contending Amateur League players F tier - new Amateur League players Each tier will have a maximum size, with numbers to be determined, and subject to change over time. You can gain better spots in the list by defeating someone above you in a tournament or showmatch. By winning, you will take the spot of the person above you, whereas everyone you skipped past loses 1 spot Bo 5 and above required The event has to be relevant to the Tier Ladder format (2v2 results don't impact a 1v1 ladder etc) Non-Meta Plays events will count as well, but are subject to moderator approval Requesting showmatches is also an option where needed: Subject to moderator approval This avoids spammed requests, or cases where the players will face off in another event soon You may only issue such challenges 1 tier up Your opponent may decline with certain TBD valid reasoning At the highest levels, we, or our content partners may offer coverage and/or prizes on a case-by-case basis If we are not already aware of the event, you will have to self-report the results. Only the most recent result will count. What are the Benefits of the Tier Ladder? We have had a lot of feedback since we started regarding how the tournaments aren't for everyone. We believe the Tier Ladder, and splitting competition into Amateur, Rising Star, and Pro Leagues will service the majority of the competitive community, and offer a maximized number of players the ability to participate. In points: Everyone with a competitive mindset can participate Participants get to have the controlled tournament/showmatch experience that ranked does not offer Everyone gets clear goals to work towards, or maintain Fair play, similarly skilled opponents Separate Prizes for Amateur/Rising Star/Pro League - not just for the best few players in the world We get to work together with other content creators more When can we expect the Tier Ladder's Launch? While development of the official page has not yet started, we are about to begin working on the system. That said, we are discussing testing this with a simpler format, such as a Discord-based list for the moment. Before that though, we'd love to hear what you all have to say, as we have not yet decided on several details and rules. For the moment, we will not commit to a release date, and will run with the classic "it's ready when it's ready". This is all we have for today, but stay tuned - upon the completion of our currently active leagues, we will release a project finance update. Best wishes, The Meta Plays Team