ESEA MDL Global Challenge S35 will run online

Representatives of ESEA MDL Global Challenge Season 35 announced that the tournament will take place online. Initially, it was planned to organize a LAN championship for teams from four regions, but due to the unfavorable epidemiological situation, participants from all over the world can not gather in one place.

Earlier this year, ESEA began the current season of the Mountain Dew League with the optimistic intent of running a global event with participating teams from four different regions across the world: Asia, Australia, North America & Europe. However, with the still ongoing global health situation, rising cases across the globe and iconic physical sporting organisations unable to avoid postponing matches, we find it not feasible to have an MDL Global Challenge with participating teams from four different regions in the world.

As a result, we will be restructuring this MDL Season to be played entirely online.

With this move, we also have to make the hard decision of reassigning the two available ESL Pro League slots that were previously part of the MDL Global Challenge to individual regions. As we did earlier this year, those EPL slots will go to the European and North American region, each will be assigned one slot. Therefore Europe and North America shall both once again compete for the following breakdown:

  1. $12,500 & ESL Pro League slot
  2. $10,000
  3. $5,000

For the Asian and Oceanic regions, we understand it will be frustrating that the regions once again will not have a direct connection into the ESL Pro League. We will assign an additional $10,000 for the first place on top of the previously announced prize breakdown and we will be working with ESL as they plan their 2021 calendar to identify potential future events/qualifiers that the Asia and Australia winners of the previous qualifying season and this current season could be invited to due to their performance in these respective tournaments.