[Bobby Shaftoe]

Have they provided any information regarding the format this is going to take, such as leagues/tournaments, timing: once a week, every other day?

Based on my experience with PS1 Outfit Wars (where I was a ringer in multiple outfits) and Global Agenda*, you are seriously going to struggle to keep interest/prevent burnout, not to mention the sheer logistics of requiring 96 people to be online, ready and have no interruptions for however long a 'match' lasts.

For your average 'outfit' one set 'time' per week is probably going to be either the maximum or minimum amount of time that everyone that wants to be involved will actually be able to be involved.

Otherwise depending on frequency/intensity you'll get teams as mentioned, dropping out and everyone that still wants to play consolidating into the few outfits remaining with the sheer numbers/ability to be fully manned, leaving 2 maybe 3 outfits per faction, or even worse, per server that can compete.

*Agency Vs Agency conquest was a map with 100 or so hexes that each Agency could bid on to either own or attack if someone else owned it (Each Hex was a 10v10 instanced match), at the start there were large populations, lots of Agencies and players, larger Agencies/Alliances usually had the larger share of the Hexes (there were times when you had 15+ alerts at once) but there was enough competition involved where little Agencies could sneak a couple hexes here and there. All fine and dandy, except the Conquest time was 4 hours... a night... 5 days a week.

As you can imagine, requiring 20 hours a week of constant vigilance, fighting on the same hexes against the same people over and over meant that interest fell off fast.
Agencies/Alliances disbanded through a combination or burnout, boredom and frustration.
Most of those that remained, joined the few larger Agencies that kept playing resulting in 90% of hexes being split between 2 maybe 3 large Alliances per zone. (of course there were a huge number of changes to hex management etc etc but the end result was still 2 Alliances being the only relevant ones on the map)

New Agencies wanting to get into AVA after this first 'war' then had the struggle of fighting vastly more experienced, larger and better equipped enemies.

EU servers were essentially a 1v1 alliance brawl and US was 1 large alliance sitting on everything needed to 'win' the map. All of this happened in the first 'season' which was ridiculously long (3 months or so).

They then broke up seasons into a couple weeks or just a weeks' duration but by then the large majority didn't play AVA anymore.