u/coldrolledpotmetal

Ranked is just the floor of competitive play in The Finals. The next step up is pick-up games (PUGs): organized team play against teams that actually want to compete, casters covering the matches, and a Discord full of people you can build a team from. The community runs casted weekly PUGs Monday through Thursday, and Brawlr.gg launched earlier this month as a standalone competitive platform that adds its own ranked ladder, scrim-finding, and tournaments on top.

Weekly community games

All three run live on Twitch with full casting, so your match might end up on broadcast. Join the host's Discord to get in the lobby.

• Ape Squad Merch Mondays, Mondays @ 5PM PDT / 8PM EDT. Custom games hosted by Ape Squad, the same org behind the Ape Squad Classics tournament series. Discord | Stream
• TFC Tuesday Night PUGs, Tuesdays @ 5PM PDT / 8PM EDT. Hosted by The Finals Central, a community-run content portal covering the Finals (and Deadlock) scene with articles, event coverage, and featured streams. They also post featured matches to YouTube. Discord | Stream
• CODEBREAKERS Thursday PUGs, Thursdays @ 5PM PDT / 8PM EDT. Hosted by CODEBREAKERS, a community that started as a Powershift tournament group and grew into a hub for customs, tournaments, and general Finals/Arc Raiders hangout. They run customs most nights. Thursday is the casted one. Discord | Stream

Brawlr.gg

Brawlr is a competitive platform built specifically for The Finals by pro player Etelco, launched earlier this month. Signup is free with a Discord account. Available whenever, built around three main pieces:

• Arena is Brawlr's own ranked 3v3 matchmaking, with its own Elo rating, five tiers (D through S), and a global leaderboard. Queue solo, duo, or trio. The system builds a balanced 6-player lobby, you do map bans, and play it out on a private Finals server.
• Competitions are tournaments and leagues hosted on the platform with interactive brackets, standings, and community-funded prize pools. The FINALS Masters 3v3 beta on April 25 is the first Finals tournament running there.
• Scrims are pre-arranged practice matches between two specific teams, a level of organization above ranked or Arena play. This is one of the main ways teams prepare for tournaments. Brawlr's scrim finder lets teams post match offers (availability, skill, format) that other teams send requests on.

See you in the arena, contestants!

Source: https://x.com/RealHeistGames/status/2045698855392452635

I watched through the second league day for NA in the Ape Squad Classic and pulled all the loadouts I could catch from the broadcast plus every team comp across the 10 rounds shown. This is a snapshot of where the meta has settled a few weeks into S10, not exhaustive per-round tracking (since I don't have data for the rounds that weren't broadcasted), so take the off-meta counts with a grain of salt.

Overall the meta hasn't shifted a ton since the S9 scrim meta, but a few things worth calling out:

• The 93R is the new Light top pick at 9 users and basically the only big shift from S9. The rest of the Light weapon pool is genuinely the most diverse of the three classes, with ARN-220, V9S, M11, XP-54, and even a Dagger and LH1 all showing up. The P90 seems to have dropped out entirely
• Heal Beam is basically locked on Medium, with a handful of Demat users mixing it up. Medium has also solidified around FCAR and Repeater as the two dominant picks. The gadget trio (Defib, Jump Pad, Goo) is essentially mandatory
• Mesh edges out Winch on Heavy (12 vs 9), and when teams run double heavy it's almost always Mesh + Winch together (3 of 4 comps). The SHAK might also be edging out the SA1216 as the top Heavy weapon
• Heavy was present in every single comp on broadcast. No Light/Medium-only comps at all
• The C4 vs Healing Emitter flex on Heavy seems to track with whether the team is playing more aggressive or more sustain-focused, though I didn't really track this systematically

Curious what people think, how does this compare to your experiences in ranked?