As announced before, the signups will end on this sunday, so far we have 21 singups, but some nations that announced their attendance are still missing!
The rosters are still open for any changes until the 10th february. After this deadline the rosters will be locked and only a maximum of 2 new players can join the account. From all active players in the teamaccounts we will randomly draw 3 players for the passportcheck.

Who those players are will be announced on Friday the 12th to the teamcaptains. Every drawn player has time to submit his passportcopy to a special emailacount, announced together with the list.
The emails will be checked by one admin, who is not an active player in the event and every email will be deleted after the passportcheck!
If a player with trusted 2 status or higher gets randomed the request counts as fullyfilled.
Also we are going to going to contact additional players, who are suspected of faking their nationality. Those players will also have to upload their passportcopy until the deadline and they will be excluded from the 3 checks per nation rule.

Every player has to submit their passportcopys until Monday the 22nd on 23.59 cet. If a player fails to upload their copy by then, he will recieve 3 penalty points and remains as barred for the country championship, until he submits a valid passportcopy.
If a player being supected of faking his nationality fails to submit his passportcopy, he will recieve also 3 penaltypoints as well as a one month long barrage.

As in the football worldcup we will also use 4 different seedpools.
Those Pools are determined by the size of the local communities, the ammount of teams competing in the internationaltop-tier, aswell as the results in former nationscups.

Top Seeds:
France
United Kingdom
Spain
Germany

Medium Seeds:
Finland
Sweden
Denmark
Russia

Low Seeds:
USA
Brazil
Belgium
Czech Republic

and last but not least the unseeded pool, with all remaining nations in it.

Since the Nationscup will run in the offseason we will have a tight schedule with two groupmatches per week.
All groupstage matches will be played with 2x20 Adminmap.
For 24 Nations attending the shedule would look as followed:

Match 1: Monday 22.2.10 / 21 cet /dod_argentan
Match 2: Wednesday 24.2.10 / 21 cet /dod_harrington
Match 3: Monday 1.3.10 / 21 cet / dod_anzio
Match 4: Wednesday 4.3.10 / 21 cet / dod_lennon
Match 5: Monday 7.3.10 /21 cet / dod_salerno

In the playoffs we will switch back to the usual format, with one match per week and best-of-three Mapelimination.
The Mappool for the Playoffs will be:

dod_anzio
dod_salerno
dod_catania_rc2
dod_argentan
dod_coire_rc3
dod_lennon
dod_harrington

The defaultdate will be Wednessdays, 21.00 CET.

As known from the EMS, every nation has to announce their lineup and a statement aswell as a working public SourceTV with at least 100 slots 24 hours before every match.
If a nation fails to do so, 3 Penaltypoints will be given away (one for the statement, one for the lineup and one for the STv).

Additionally we will use the nationscup as first testrun for our new Aequitasrule:

If a player can't upload his aequitasfile because of an error, he has to open a supportticket within the next 24 hours and explain his problem. If the errorcode is a known one and the solution to the problem is written down the
Aequitas FAQ or the user has the errorcode for a second time after a solution to that problem was explained to him over the supportticket before, penalty points will be given away.

We wish every Nation and their supporters nice matches and a soomthly running ESL Nationscup 2010!

Your ESL Day of Defeat: Source Admin Team: ambi, angel, GeRock, Lokj, micHiiii, Peandreo, RaYnii, Steiner and fAn