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Posted this in the BWC D2 thread as well, but I felt like it deserved a blog post of its own, so here we go. This is why I think the BWC felt too much like a regular tournament and too little like a "true" world championship.
Because there were multiple reps from countries and the amount of seeds to each continental championship was uneven. China and Korea got 10 seeds each to WCS Asia. Germany got 4 seeds to WCS Europe, Denmark, Finland and Belgium only got one each. It's perfectly reasonable from a tournament standpoint, because Blizz wants a spectacular tournament, and that means making sure lots of Koreans show up, because they ARE the best. Does it make a good tournament? Yes. Does it make a world championship? No, because you get one country playing against itself in the finals. It was very obvious that Creator and PartinG were not playing to represent Korea. They were representing themselves. Thus, the entire "World Championship" idea is void.
The solution? There are 2 obvious ones in my mind.
1) Make it a teamleague format. Hold national qualifiers for each country's team - Let the top 8 players from each country represent them, and let them pick a coach. Then play it out similar to the GSTL, online or offline, doesn't matter. There are now no true qualifiers - everyone qualifies to the main event. If it's too risky to do it online due to cheats, hold a few big events where you handle 1-2 groups at a time until the global finals where the Ro4 and the Finals go on in bo11 or something. The world champion country team is then crowned.
2) Even out seeds. Every country now gets 1 seed, period. Qualifiers still happen up to the continental level, then the final 16 or 24 or whatever go to the BWC. With Korea now having 1 player, France having 1 player, the US having 1 player, everything would be much more national. However, this feels very coinflippy to me, as each country now rides on one person. Pressure much! Therefore I like Method #1 better.
Would Korea basically autowin? Probably, but that's ok because 1) they already do that anyway and 2) It would FEEL like a world championship, because the final team would be KOREA's team, not PartinG or Creator as individuals.
 
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The Olympics doesn't exactly restrict each country to one athlete, you know...
Idea #1) We already have something like that, it's called "GSL World Championship" and it's Korea vs. the World. If the entire World cannot win against Korea, then having France vs. Korea, USA vs. Korea, Sweden vs. Korea, etc. would just be pointless. Dividing the foreign power would just hinder them even more.
Until the World actually beats Korea once or twice, I don't think we should deviate from the Korea vs. World format. South Korea really is just that good.
Idea #2) Yes, it would be pretty silly to rely on one player for the entire country. Having arbitrary seeding (South Korea gets this many seeds, France gets far less) is not exactly fair, but evening out the seeds would be a huge disadvantage to South Korea. Perhaps the number of seeds that each country receives should be determined by other means?
Personally, I am a strong believer in merit - you should earn your spot! If all countries get 3 representatives or whatever, then the NA/EU players who place 4th-32nd (in the best case scenario for South Korea) will take home a huge chunk of money, while 50+ deserving South Koreans at home did not get any money.
WCS South Korea was the hardest of all national qualifiers, and I think that should be reflected in the seeding. A World Championship should crown the best players, period - why bring nationalities into this?
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Korea would win every time without any competition. Honestly it would just so predictable. At least now we get to wonder which Korean will win.
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Five stars... I agree with this.
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So... you want Creator, Parting and Rain to have been on one team....
No lol, these changes don't make sense to me, I prefer it how it was.
all I would have changes is having Terran better so that some were in the tourney
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On November 19 2012 08:35 Scholera wrote:
So... you want Creator, Parting and Rain to have been on one team....
No lol, these changes don't make sense to me, I prefer it how it was.
all I would have changes is having Terran better so that some were in the tourney
But at least this way we don't have people becoming disinterested in the entire Ro8/Ro4 due to all-Koreans. I think the idea is definitely something to look into.
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Would be more cool to see maybe the top 6 teams from Korea compete in a small team league format along with maybe 2 foreign teams... but a country vs country team competition will never work because everyone knows the winner. I'm saying have this on top of the individual bwc tournament, but in general team leagues are pretty expensive I would imagine.
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They didn't give more seeds to Korea just to make it a better tournament, they based the seeds on how many active users there were in any given country. Korea has the most players so they got the most seeds, then of course in asia finals koreans are the best so they took up more spots than the other countries there.
Edit: Forgot to say the point of the tournament wasn't to determine which country is the best at sc2, the spirit of the tournament was to crown a world champion. Parting won so he is crowned best sc2 player this year, while that isn't necessarily true it is what the tournament is intended for. They only emphasized the regionals into nationals into continental into world format so that it would help showcase more up and coming players and maybe draw attention to countries people wouldn't normally get to see.
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On November 19 2012 10:43 DanLee wrote:
They didn't give more seeds to Korea just to make it a better tournament, they based the seeds on how many active users there were in any given country. Korea has the most players so they got the most seeds, then of course in asia finals koreans are the best so they took up more spots than the other countries there.
Edit: Forgot to say the point of the tournament wasn't to determine which country is the best at sc2, the spirit of the tournament was to crown a world champion. Parting won so he is crowned best sc2 player this year, while that isn't necessarily true it is what the tournament is intended for. They only emphasized the regionals into nationals into continental into world format so that it would help showcase more up and coming players and maybe draw attention to countries people wouldn't normally get to see.
If that really was their intention they did a terrible job at it. With the qualifying events set up the way they were, it was always going to be 3-4 true top tier players stomping everyone else. The Korean qualifier needed to give more BWC seeds. Whether Blizzard doubles the Korean seeds only or doubled every regions seeds, it needed to happen.
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EPT
