2026 Competitive Events Update

With the New Year thoroughly underway it's time now to talk about competitive play in Predecessor in 2026! This includes what we have planned, how you can take part, and how you can help support the scene!

To summarise this blog, we will have our first Official Omeda Tournament of the year beginning on March 14th, with all the details found below. We will also cover our official plans for the rest of the year, but also cover how we plan to support community-run events as well. Lastly we want to discuss improvements that we have planned for Ranked, as well as the Replay Tool.

To put it simply, Omeda is dedicated to competitive play and we want to ensure that throughout 2026 we showcase that commitment, so let's dive in.

2026 Competitive Format

For 2026, we’re committed to running a range of Official Omeda events that will reward players with both prize money and Pinnacle Points - a new reward that competitors can collect throughout the year. On top of that we’re also dedicating resources to supporting various community events!

Community Events

Having seen the recent success of the Soul x Gazoo Tournament in January we can’t help but be excited for what else the community has in store this year. We will be looking at partnering with these types of events throughout 2026 with support ranging from help promoting and running tournaments to prize money support.

What’s more is that these events don’t even have to be your standard 5v5 Ranked style tournaments though. We’re keen to support all kinds of events; 1v1s, ARAM, South America Only, Controller Only - go wild!

Official Events

This year we will be committed to running two Minor Events and two Major Events. The Minor Events will be held in the Spring and Fall period, with the Major Events occurring in the Summer and Winter.

Minor Events will require all teams to play through an open qualifier to progress, while Major Events will have a mix of pre-seeded slots based on Pinnacle Points, with additional slots available through open qualification.

Pinnacle Points

Pinnacle Points are earned by finishing in the top 10 in any Official Omeda event. Events that happen later in the year will be worth more points, and they will be distributed weighted by your final placement, meaning that those in top tier positions will net significantly more points than those who place lower.

These points will be used to guarantee placement in major events, allowing teams to bypass the play-in stage and ensure they will make it into the streamed portions of the event.

Further details on Pinnacle Points work will be provided in a future update.

Esports Bundles

Much like our Esports Supporter Bundles last year, we will be driving prize funds through in-game sales, allowing the community to directly support the competitive scene.

Our first bundle of the year will arrive with the Spring Open Qualifier and see a return of the iconic gold and black esports theme for five more Heroes. Beyond this, new bundles will drop roughly quarterly to coincide with future events.

100% of profits from these bundles will go directly to the competitive scene, supporting event costs and prize pools.

We are committed to flexibly increasing the available prize pool for all events this year, bundle-profit-permitting.

The success of these bundles will directly influence the possibility of an Official Omeda LAN event at the beginning of next year. If you wish to participate in an in-person competitive event next year, please support us with these bundles!

Spring Open Qualifier

We’re pleased to announce that we’re partnering once again with PCC to host our first event of the year during the patch cycle for 1.12!

This event will be open for all players to sign-up for, and will feature both European and North American regions.

Note, regions are exclusive this time - so make sure you only sign up for the region you want to play in!

Spring Open Qualifier Key Dates:

• NOW - Signups Open

• Feb 28 - Signups Lock

• Mar 7 - Bracket is Published

• Mar 14 - Play-Ins (Format to be determined)

• Mar 15 - Best of 3 Single-Elimination Quarter Finals NA/EU

• Mar 21 - Best of 5 Semi Finals NA/EU

• Mar 22 - Best of 5 Finals

Currently the reward for this event sits at $4,000 USD for each region ($8,000 total), split 60% for 1st place, 30% for 2nd place, and 10% for 3rd place. This value can increase based on community support (more on that later). This event will also reward Pinnacle Points to the top 10 teams.

Some of you might have calculated that this event takes place right across when we’d typically deliver a balance patch. In order to deliver the best competitive experience we have shifted the schedule to ensure that there will be a comprehensive balance patch the first Tuesday before tournament play begins. Additionally there will also be a second balance patch on the Tuesday after the event ends, so that you don’t have to wait 4 weeks without any balance changes. The update cadence will return to normal from v1.13 onwards.

Sign ups are open now, so don't delay!

SIGN UP NOW

The Summer Summit

The Summer Summit will be our first major seeded tournament. It will feature the 8 teams with the highest Pinnacle Points with a further 8 teams joining them through an open qualifier play-in stage.

Like the Spring Open Qualifier, NA and EU are the featured regions for this event. $7,000 will be up for grabs for each region ($14,000 total), with the same podium split as the Spring event. Pinnacle Points will also be awarded in this event.

Additionally, achieving a podium finish in The Summer Summit will have your teams immortalized in the game in the form of minor cosmetics:

• Winning Team Icon

• Winning Team Banner

• Winning Team OHE

These will be made available after the event in the form of a bundle. 100% of the bundle’s profits will go directly to supporting the competitive scene.

Fall Open Qualifier

Fall will feature another open qualifying event where the top 8 teams will progress to the streamed portion of the event.

The prize here will be determined by the profits from the previous two esports bundles, with another batch of Pinnacle Points for the top 10 placing teams.

The Pinnacle

The Pinnacle is a seeded tournament taking place this Winter where the top 12 teams are locked in based on Pinnacle Points earned throughout the entire year, with 4 play-in slots available for any late bloomers.

Once again prizes will come from the profits of the year’s esports bundles. The winners of this tournament will receive the biggest collection of in game rewards available to date, with the winning teams from each region having the following cosmetics added to the game:

• 5x new Skin Variants representing their team and their colours, with each player getting to pick their preferred Hero and Skin*.

• Winning Team Icon

• Winning Team Banner

• Winning Team OHE

Additionally the teams that come 2nd and 3rd place will have Banners and Icons added to the game after their teams.

*Each player from the winning team can select an existing Epic or lower tier skin for any hero they won a game with during The Pinnacle.

As before, these rewards will be made available in game and 100% of the profits generated from their sale will go directly to the competitive scene.

Ranked and Competitive Improvements

While there’s lots of exciting events to look forward to, there’s also a lot of nice QOL changes coming to the in-game competitive experience too.

Replay Fixes

The Replay system has experienced various issues over the years that have remained unfixed and slowly compounded to lower the overall experience with the tool.

In v1.11.2 we started to fix these and will continue to address the most problematic ones in v1.12 and beyond. Likewise, we will also be looking at ways to continually improve the Replay system over the coming year based on community feedback.

Ranked Improvements

We have been working on three major changes to the Ranked system for some time, with all three of them expected to arrive in the next Ranked Split.

1. Matchmaking Changes

Firstly, we are changing how we make Ranked games.

Until now we have been using an internal MMR system that helps us evaluate player’s skill, however the matchmaking has not been taking into account player’s Rank, which has been an ongoing point of player feedback.

Moving forward from v1.12 we will be taking into account both Player Rank and VP to try and deliver games that more closely match players of similar rank together. We will maintain and use our internal MMR, but when creating matches, VP will now play a much bigger role.

2. High-Rank Match Quality:

For a while now we have had an issue where we often split up our highest Paragon matches into two different games and fill in the spaces with Platinum players. We have been working with a number of Paragon players from the community to help identify why this is happening and to address these issues. We are currently testing fixes on the EU Ranked servers, and once we confirm it is fixed will be pushing it out to both NA and EU Ranked servers.

We understand how long this issue has pained our Paragon players, and we thank you all for your patience and support in addressing this. We want to ensure that players who aspire to reach the top of the ranked ladder are provided the most competitive matches possible as they climb, and part of that is ensuring we do our best to match the best 10 players currently in queue into the same match, and we will continue to iterate until that is the case.

3. Placements

In v1.12 with the new Ranked Split reset we will implement placement matches that will allow us to better distribute and place players for the start of the new split.

• Players will now have to complete placement games before a Rank is given

• During the start of a new season, 10 games must be played before you will be ranked

• During the start of a new split, 5 games must be played before you will be ranked

• New players to be ranked or players who did not finish their previous split’s placement games will be required to complete 10 placement games.

Future Official LAN Events

We know that many of you would like to see a LAN event happen, especially after the success of Gazoo’s community LAN in 2025.

This year we are looking to partner with Gazoo to potentially hold an official LAN at the beginning of next year. The more support we receive on the Esports Bundles, the stronger the signal is from players that they really want to see a LAN, and the greater our chances are of delivering one to you.

One thing we can share is that we are working on a Live Spectator system to support a LAN in the event that one happens.

Lastly we wanted to give massive thanks to all our players that push themselves to their limit to prove that they are the best that Predecessor has to offer. Thanks as well to the hard working community members who put on epic events for us all to enjoy and of course the viewers that enable all the storylines and content and allow this all to happen in the first place.

Here’s to an incredible competitive season!

- Omeda Demonde & Kari