Throughout the month of March and beyond, Ubisoft has teamed up with Virgin Gaming to offer a free online ladder and tournament for Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood on both the XBox 360 and Playstation 3. Participants will compete to win their share of a $25,000 prize pool, with a grand prize of $5,000 going to the best player on each console. The tournament is structured with a preliminary ladder round open to all players who own a copy of the game and an active online account for their perspective consoles. Following the open ladder round, the top 128 ranked players on each console will move onto a final tournament to compete for the cash prizes. The qualifying round began on March 3rd for the XBox 360, and will end on March 28th. The Playstation 3 ladder has not opened yet, but should be available soon.
What is particularly interesting about the mechanics of this tournament is that Virgin Gaming has developed a system where the results of each match are pulled automatically from the game servers after the match has ended. This process occurs all on its own and the tournament does not require players to report results or present proof of a win. Having spent some time playing in the tournament myself, I must say that the system works quite well and offers a unique type of online gaming competition.
For those of you wondering the more technical details about the tournament, the game type played is Wanted. Opponents pair up in matches on the Virgin Gaming site, meet up in a player match lobby within Brotherhood, and compete in a standard Wanted game against other random online opponents. For the ladder and tournament, the system only looks at the scores of the two competitors regardless of their final places within a given game. In other words, to earn a win in the tournament you only need to beat your opponent’s score. Match winners are awarded 2 points, and the losers are awarded 1. The top 128 players with the most points on each console at the end of the preliminary rounds will move onto the final round of the tournament.
For more information and to join in on the competition, visit Virgin Gaming’s Website.