Lately, Ubisoft is indeed doing a substantial overhaul of the international Rainbow Six competitive scene. Finally, they announced their collaboration with FACEIT, which marks a new chapter in the Rainbow Six Siege competitive scene in the United States, through a new competition called the North America League.
Aside from what is happening in the United States, Ubisoft also recently announced the structure of their competition in the Asia Pacific. As in the United States, this competition is given a similar name, namely the Rainbow Six APAC League. One of the biggest changes in the structure of this new competition is the addition of new divisions.
I talked about this with Ajie Zata (Lotus), a shoutcaster figure for the ID6 R6 community, who also served as manager of one of Indonesia’s top R6 teams, Team Scrypt. In our conversation, Ajie told us that the R6 APAC League came with a new division, namely APAC North and APAC South.
In more detail, Ubisoft provides a list of countries from the division. R6 APAC League – North Division contains Japan, South Korea and SEA which include Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, the Philippines and Thailand. One of the highlights of the North Division is the presence of a Fnatic team that contains Australian players. This itself happened because they moved their roster players to Japan to compete in the R6 APAC League – North Division.
Then the R6 APAC League – South Division contains two sub-regions namely Oceania and South Asia. Australia, New Zealand, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia represent Oceania, while South Asia contains India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan.
Other changes occur in the format of the match. The North Division match format uses the Swiss System. Later 12 teams consisting of 6 from the invitation and 6 from the qualifications, will compete in the best-of-one format. After the first wave of matches and the top 6 teams were revealed, the match was then continued with the next Swiss Wave System.
The match will be divided into 10 playday for 5 weeks, with 6 matches held every week. Later the top team will advance to the APAC regional qualifier, to get the chance to compete in the Six Major.
Meanwhile South Divison has its own format. Regional Oceania and South Asia have their respective round-robin formats. Later 3 teams from Oceania and 1 team from South Asia will meet in the South Division Playoff. The two best teams from the division advanced to the APAC Playoff to compete with 6 other teams from the North Division.
Although structurally it looks more tidy, and provides opportunities for more teams, one that is not yet visible from this structure may be support for competition for the community. Not only that, Ubisoft also hasn’t mentioned who the team will be to fill in the R6 APAC North Division.
