Ah Preseason…

The first foray into the actual competition for the season. You’ve already gotten a taste of how everything works from the Gymnasium, so I’ll skip over that. If you’ve never played before and you haven’t looked at the Gym yet, go back to your Dashboard and play around in the Gym first to get a feel for how things work without messing up your score and read our other blog about the importance of the Gym (which also teaches you how to navigate the platform if you have no idea what you’re doing).

The first thing you should know is that Preseason is MANDATORY!

Participation in Preseason determines what bracket (either Bronze, Silver, or Gold) you’ll be in during the Individual game. If you do not log into Cyber Skyline during Preseason and attempt at least one question (you don’t even need to answer it correctly), you will be placed in the Pewter bracket.

What placing in Pewter means is that you cannot officially rank on the leader board and you will not receive a scouting report at the end of the season, effectively making your participation in the Individual game somewhat of a waste of time and money. You have a full week to participate in the NCL Preseason game, so there is no reason you shouldn’t have time to attempt one question. If you’re someone who forgets dates easily, put the games in your phone calendar and set reminders so you don’t risk missing out.

During this week you do not need to be playing 24/7, just log on in your free time and do what you can throughout the week. Do not skip class, tests, assignments, etc. because you decided to spend every last minute playing NCL. Think about it this way, if you fail out of school because you were ignoring your classes for NCL, you won’t be able to play in NCL anymore.

As for the actual game play, you will not see all of the NCL categories during Preseason. You will only see a “Getting Started” category, along with about five actual challenge categories. Make sure you don’t skip the questions in getting started; you may already know the answers and it may seem like a waste of time, but those questions do have points that count towards your score.

Once Preseason is over, it’ll be a few days before you find out what bracket you placed in for the Individual game.

Cyber Skyline does a cheating audit after each portion of the competition to keep the competition fair and removes anyone found cheating off of the leader board and into the Pewter bracket. This means that you may end up in a higher rank on the leader board, possibly altering which bracket you’re in, which is why they wait until the cheating audit is finished to determine brackets.

This is everything you need to know about the NCL Preseason game. If you have any more questions about Preseason or anything else NCL related, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, @Jeana_Byte.