ESL confirm coaching rollout in ESL Challenger League

With ESL Challenger League Season 47 starting last night, some were surprised to find that coaches were unable to join the server with their team despite the feature being added recently by FACEIT. However, it now appears that this minor oversight has been resolved as EFG Product Manager Nicolas Hammer confirmed last night that the feature should be rolled out to all ECL divisions effective today.

Essentially the original announcement made by ESEA only applied to leagues under their purview i.e. ESEA Open through ESEA Advanced —not ESL Challenge League. That league, as is evident by its name, is operated by the ESL Pro Tour (EPT) team within ESL and therefore has separate operating policies and procedures. As such, while ESEA were quick to roll out the coach plugin, within the EPT team there was seemingly some confusion over where and when the feature would be rolled out, with ESL only adding coach support to EPT qualifiers on February 12th while not enabling the feature in ECL at the same time.

This potential oversight was pointed out by Hammer who noted that, "all the regions should have the coach functionality enabled" suggesting that the EPT team was always in favor of all online EPT products having the new coaching slot. So, moving forward outside of this minor flub affecting a handful of teams, coaching should finally return to ESL Challenger League. This feature will likely be appreciated by coaches across ECL as they previously had to use ad hoc methods to support their teams ever since Valve removed the coach slot following the release of CS2.