We are announcing a seeding tournament to take place during the two previously blank days in our schedule this month. On 14 Feb and 16 Feb, we will have special matches involving our 16 automatically-qualified Contestants in order to determine seeding for the Regular Season.
The purpose of seeding is to balance and optimize the schedules of all our Contestants. Ranking the 34 that will make it via the preliminaries is easy, because we have a lot of recent match data. But the data is less clear for our 16 automatic entrants.
More details will be available next week. The FAQ page has been updated. The two matches will be used for seeding only; the results won’t impact the rest of prelims or any part of the Regular Season other than scheduling.
The second announcement is about some changes to the voting form. First, a 5-minute timer is now in place, meaning you are unable to submit your vote until 5 minutes have elapsed since you loaded the page. We have had a lot of issues with illegal, automated voting last week, so we are implementing this timer to curb such activity. The timer serves another positive purpose in keeping honest voters from accidentally rushing. Some of you have shared that you might have missed an arena while scrolling down the page too quickly … or forgetting to go back to an arena you skipped at first. The timer can help slow things down a bit to encourage you to review your ballot before submitting. While you can always send us an email to change your ballot if there are errors, making sure it’s correct the first time will help everyone. 
Some people have also reported bugs with the abstain counter (i.e. it showing a negative number); I have adjusted the code, and the counter should be accurate now. Thanks for all the feedback on this issue.
And thank you, everyone, for your patience and cooperation overall! We’re committed to making sure that everybody plays fair in this tournament and that we have the most accurate results.
One last thing — we are grateful for SirWence, who is our most recent donor. Thank you!
