Tactics League-sanctioned events award competitors with Competitor Points (CP) based on their finished ranking after the conclusion of the event. As of yesterday, Season 1 has officially closed and we are finalizing plans for the upcoming Competitive Season 2. Let’s take a look at all of the events we have hosted over the year:

• 2023 Opener
  • Date: October 8, 2023
  • Number of Competitors: 5
  • Event Runtime: 9 hours and 15 minutes
  • Rebroadcast: https://youtu.be/D-Fb3TdCN4Y
  • Tournament Data: https://tacticsleague.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Tactics-League-2023-Opener-Tournament-Data.pdf
    
• 2024 – Starter Winter Cup #1
  • Date: February 11, 2024
  • Number of Competitors: 8
  • Event Runtime: 4 hours and 58 minutes
  • Rebroadcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFHN_ooy-VA
  • Tournament Data: https://tacticsleague.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Tactics-League-2024-Starter-Winter-Cup-1-Competition-Data.pdf

Competitor Points – Final Ranking (Standard)

Ranking is determined by accumulative CP awarding from past events based on your event’s placement.

• 1st – @WngMan – 1500 pts.
• 2nd – @jokerfisch – 1100 pts.
• 3rd – @dr.jay. – 800 pts.
• 4th – @therumer – 600 pts.
• 5th – @pista – 400 pts.
• 6th – @sandcatankh – 400 pts.
• 7th – @mikey_tacticslive – 200 pts.
• 8th – @hewhostandsalone, @space_monkey00 – 200 pts.

Based on the Regulation Rulebook, certain tiebreaker rules are in place to resolve where members sit when it comes to tied rankings. This is also why some members above have the same points, but different placements:

• 1st – Round Finished
• 2nd – Total Games Played in the finished series (up to 4)
• 3rd – Your Opponent’s Seeding/rank
• 4th – Units Alive Per Game cumulatively

With Season 1 at its end, I want to thank everyone who has participated in the past events and even those who were anticipating the now canceled 2024 Fall Cup, for being a part of the competitive scene I look forward to new heights, new players, and new competitions to come with Season 2, starting on October 15, 2024!

Copied directly from the Tactics League’s Discord
It is with a tough decision to announce that the upcoming Standard – 2024 Fall Cup for October 6, 2024 is now canceled. This event is canceled due to not reaching the minimum number of fully eligible competitors for it to proceed.

The reason the minimum number of 6 is there is to avoid a short event or potentially starting out in Semi-Finals; the goal is to put on a show and showcase Tactics League in a LIVE manner, though it is not an ideal look when the event falls short of players and has a short ending to its beginning.

What Comes Next?

Since the event did not meet its required expectations, we will move forward. This event was the last of ⁠Season 1 – Competitor Points and thus the future is now set for Season 2. This means that CP will be reset and all past competitors will restart at zero CP. As mentioned earlier in the beginning process of Competition 3, the next event to plan for is the Generics Premade format. As a Tactics League official format, this format needs an opportunity to be showcased in a LIVE competition and that will be the goal going forward.

Season 2 Initial Changes

I do apologize to anyone that took time off or had to plan around to participate in this event. One issue that stemmed that did become a problem was relying on “interests” to fully gauge participation levels. This is still feasible, but will not be the core decider for future events; Sign-Ups will start earlier and will close earlier to give at least 1 – 2 weeks ahead of time before the event date to give plenty of time to determine if we are good to go or not. This also gives people more time to respond in the event of a cancelation instead of it being last minute.

Thank you to all who were interested in competing or were planning to help with Sunday’s event and I apologize once more for the cancelation in the matter.

With the dust settling down after the largest update yet in Tactics League’s history, it’s time to put your skills with the plethora of new and exciting changes to the ultimate test: another live competition!

This competition utilizes Tactics League’s tried-and-true competitive Standard format, where players have access to an array of different unique characters, equipment, abilities, and jobs ALL at their disposal with limitations baked right into the patch and format. As the third competition, we have new and returning competitors looking to take on the challenges of both time, intellect, and strategy as they make their way through a single-elimination style bracket that is targeted to take approximately 5 hours.

As the last event in the first competitive season, we are hoping you will join this presentation and watch it LIVE at either Tactics League Discord or the Tactics League Twitch channel (or both)!

This event will take place on October 6, 2024, starting at 12:30 PM EDT.

For more information about this event, please visit our Events page.

In PvP Patch version 3, many gender equality changes were made to close the gap between male and female build varieties; hair adornments, bags, perfumes, and the Tynar Rouge accessory were now accessible to males. Additionally, the reaction abilities, Fury and Magick Boost, that were gender-locked to Bard and Dancer were added so that either gender could use either ability. These improvements were well-received and opened up build diversity in a positive way. However, there is one outlier that version 4 is addressing – the gap between male magical and female physical specs.

The changes you will read more about are centered around improving the male and female Squires in both Standard and Rendezvous and have minimal impact on unique characters.

To resolve this task, this required a two-pronged approach:

• First: Fixing the stat disparity by adjusting PA/MA values of the base Squire stats – the result is that male Squire will now have 13/12, and female Squire will now have 12/13, a +1 stat increase from version 3.
  
• Second: Fixing the PA and MA multipliers (also known as PAM and MAM) marginally; most jobs received a 5% bonus to these multipliers depending on needs. For example, White Mage’s MAM was increased from 110% to 115% which resulted in generic male White Mage specifically getting an extra +1 MA.
  
• Combining the base Squire stat increase and job PAM/MAM resulted in:
  Male White Mage – 11/14 (+1 MA)
  Female White Mage – 10/15
  
• Lastly, to make sure being a male or female gender still played a role in the higher HP or MP spread, male Squires received +8 HP and female Squires received +9 MP.
  
• The accomplished goal of these changes is that the total stat spread (between PA and MA) is no more than 1 point between either gender. You can still build “optimally” and use a female White Mage, or you can choose for whatever reason (aesthetics, sprite design, wanting to use the additional PA) and go male White Mage instead and perform well and with a bit more added bulk!

The result of these adjustments to male White Mage for example is:

Another example of these base stat and job PAM/MAM adjustments are female Monks. In version 3, running a female Monk was very much not desirable, because there was realistically little to be gained from doing so (comparing Martial Arts, a female Monk had a marginally better Doom Fist).

In version 4, this changes quite differently, as you will now see that a female Monk is viable and even plausible for running secondary Dance or Arts of War:

And lastly, to quell any worries about how these job PAM/MAM changes affect unique characters let’s compare Agrias as a Dark Knight in version 3 and version 4:

Dark Knight’s PAM was increased from 130% to 135% resulting in a +1 PA value for female Dark Knights. This ultimately sets generic female Dark Knights to 16/11 while male Dark Knights retain 17/10 and the +1 PA translates as a minimal difference here with Agrias.

In PvP Patch v4.0, you can truly play any gender, and any job and perform well competitively. I look forward to seeing new builds and creations once we enter public beta on March 12th!

Another competition is in the history books as our first-ever cup, a single-elimination style competition was a success!

To watch (or rewatch) the tournament in its entirety with chapters to jump to specific matches:

WngMan and YoshnJa had a post-event interview talking about February 11, 2024’s event, which can be found here:

The 2024 Starter – Winter Cup #1 Champion, WngMan

WngMan has successfully fought to maintain his champion title, though it wasn’t a breeze; Pista, the 2nd runner up, took a win during their 3-game series with their first game and it really set a shocker throughout. WngMan was met with a tough opponent, one who was his first time competing in a Tactics League competition!

Pista’s team had an overall successful run through the event, and he proved that faith-based magicks are definitely viable in the metagame. Using the zoning potential of Summons and Time Magicks, Pista was a force to be reckoned with, lowering his opposition’s mobility options by controlling sections of each map he played on and enabling his power stacked Agrias to move in and sweep for the finish.

Jokerfisch, a returning player from the 2023 Opener, performed very well with his new team; definitely pushing more aggression against his opponent and even ran an interesting set up on his main unique, Cloud, which was equipped with the Steadfast Ring, an accessory that gives its bearer a short period of invulnerability, allowing Cloud to be able to engage with his arsenal of AoE attacks in Limit when he was able to do so early without fear of retaliation initially.

We also had a new competitor finished 4th, Mistral! Mistral led her female-only team (with a Bard included but he was dubbed “Fayt(Girl)” so that counts :p) to the semifinals where she put up a gracious fight against Pista for the chance to take on WngMan directly. Though she was bested this time, I am positive she will be coming back in full force for the next competition.

Dr. Jay, known for his innovation and antics with team compositions, brought a new team into the competition led by a 20-Speed Mustadio, which was capable of casting turn-one Hasteja due to blistering high speed and Swiftness, enabling his team to get the leg-up on his foe. Though he was bested by Jokerfisch in Round 1, he put up a fight that pushed to Game 3, though ultimately finishing in 5th. He truly is one of the best theorycrafters in our community and I can’t wait to see what else he has cooking in the future.

Rumer, another returning player from the 2023 Opener, brought a team that followed inspiration from the Golden Sun series, led by Meliadoul. His first match was against WngMan, so he had a tough ladder to climb automatically. Though he didn’t succeed in stopping WngMan’s winning streak, I love the fact that a thematic-esque team put up a fight especially in their first game which you can find here: https://youtu.be/GEYg79T42KI

Lastly, for our 7th and 8th ranked competitors; Space Monkey and Hew, both came into the event as first-timers with ambition to perform well and get a first-time experience in Tactics PvP competition. Space Monkey has taken a lot of effort to ask questions, reiterate, and improve as a whole to do his best within the days leading up to the event. Hew is also new to the Tactics League Discord, but he has shown some very interesting builds before and even during the event. I would definitely keep my eyes on them in the future.

Results and Registered Team Rosters

With our second ever-event and our first-ever single elimination cup completed, it is once again proven that people enjoy Final Fantasy Tactics and even more so, a fierce, live competition. We also had a phenomenal uptick in viewership, both on Twitch and the Discord’s streaming channel, and we are just getting started!

While the event is over, the match data and team rosters are now publicly available to view on both Google Sheets and PDF format which can be found below:
2024 Starter – Winter Cup #1 Competition Data – Google Sheets

It’s time for another competition!

The upcoming event will be our first-ever cup, focused on faster runtime by being single-elimination and with less Competitor Point distribution.

This Starter format-focused event is scheduled for February 11, 2024, with check-in starting at noon EST and kick-off starting at 12:30 PM EST. This tournament will be live-streamed via the Tactics League Discord and the Tactics League Twitch channel.

The 1st and 2nd place winners of the event will be invited to participate in a future Update 4 Exhibition (date is TBD) that will give them early access to PvP Patch version 4 beta while showcasing the match on the Tactics League’s Discord and Twitch channels. Keep an eye out for when this event will happen!

For more information, please check out our recently added Events page and the 2024 Starter – Winter Cup #1 page.