EPTWCS Europe:
My primary criticism of WCS Europe is the qualifiers. Only four qualifiers were hosted and from what I recall, only 512 spaces were available in each qualifier until the final one where the spaces were doubled. These players competed for 8 seeds to WCS Europe.
The Chinese had virtually no presence. It was as some of their players said, the connection lag between China and the EU region was far worse than between China and AM.
However, only one Korean qualified and it was Clarity Gaming's Shuttle. Any others who tried to fight through the bracket were quickly eliminated by some of our better foreigners. This also brings forth one of the biggest criticisms I will now clarify with the WCS Qualifiers.
They are not fair. The problem with a 512 or 1024 man single elimination or double elimination bracket is that only those who make it past every round and don't get eliminated will qualify. It means it depends wholly on how well you do in that specific bracket.
Look at TSL4 and Dreamhack Winter. Those four tournaments had very fair systems of qualification: TSL4 had 10 qualifiers for Europe and America and 5 for Korea. They required you to commit to either EU/AM or KR. Those who didn't score top 2 in each qualifier earned themselves points and were ranked by a leaderboard. Those with the most points on that leaderboard were given seeds themselves.
Dreamhack also has a fairer system. Those who didn't finish in previous Dreamhack Opens as finalists were allocated points and seeds were offered depending on the points one accumulated through that tournament season.
Copying the GSL system - where it depends wholly on you beating several rounds of Code B psychopaths in succession to qualify - isn't a good idea. The Code A qualifiers were ruthless for a reason and they didn't really congratulate effort. Did Jinro get a seed for reaching the final best of 3 and losing? No. Did TLO get a seed? No. Did MacSed get a seed? No.
In the case of WCS Europe, we had a phenomenal South African player by the name of PandaTank, missing qualification because he'd continually fumble one or two rounds before qualification.
WCS America:
This is where the vast majority of my criticism will be levelled. Major League Gaming - as I predicted in my first blog post on the topic - should not have been exclusively trusted with the operation of WCS America leaving NASL left to do absolutely nothing under an exclusivity deal that would prevent them from covering any WCS events nor hosting their own that clashed with WCS.
MLG, in my opinion, completely messed up the qualifier so badly that severe damage control is needed.
Remember that this is not the first time MLG have made bad decisions related to their leagues. Remember the 2012 Pro Circuit? One of my major criticisms in the last blog post was that the 2012 Pro Circuit followed a confusingly inconsistent format which Sundance seemed to have been making up along the way.
MLG Arenas were at first restricted under a paywall for a week before the VODs were released for free. Then we saw the Spring season split into 2 Arenas and a Championship, then we saw the Summer season finally get a sponsored free stream, but only having one arena then we saw the MvP Invitational, a pretty unfair system for qualification into the MLG Fall Championships whereby the group stage were ranked wholly by how well foreigners and eSF players fared against KeSPA's juggernauts. Then we saw the winners of each division being seeded into a final bracket where predictably... foreigners never won a series against any Koreans and 5/8 of the seeds offered were given to KR players.
Anyway, to what happened in WCS America. And the mistakes are far more severe than with ESL and WCS Europe. The worst part is that MLG made no attempt to try and amend them. In order from most severe to least severe:
- Disqualifying Comm when he was one round away from qualifying. While controversial because he was using FruitsBaskets' SC2 and MLG accounts, it was also MLG's fault for lying to Comm and other Chinese pros that they had been seeded and not seeding them even though they registered and checked in earlier than the Diamond Leaguers and map hackers who got in.
- Only doing a single qualifier. GOMTV did 2 for every GSL, ESL did 4 for WCS Europe. WHY DID MLG ONLY DO ONE?
- A 512 man bracket. This led to many people, Chinese pros included, not getting a chance to qualify.
- Seeding low leaguers. As much as I believe in everybody getting a chance, if you are below Master League, you have no chance at all in even winning a game.
- Seeding a map hacker by the name of PhysicsLee. The worst part is that he wasn't actually DQ'd until about round 6 when he eliminated good players.
- Casting the entire qualifiers from replays. This was not even acknowledged until halfway through the tournament.
- Not granting DeMusliM - a North American resident - a seed to the Ro32 but giving players like Hellokitty and Maker seeds. Blizzard's and MLG's excuse was that he did not have sufficient results in 2012. EG tweeted a damning reply to these claims proving them both wrong. This is of course a subjective point but DeMusliM was more than worthy of a WCS AM seed. He had more impressive results than Scarlett and she got in... Not knocking Scarlett as a player because she is skilled but she's had very few tournament appearences until late 2012.
And what did it culminate in? An all-Korean qualification. Here is a complete list of every pro that qualified:
Alicia
Oz
CranK
TheStC
Apocalypse
Heart
aLive
Revival
Not one foreigner hope qualified for the Premier Division in WCS America. This leads on to my next point...
Where the hell are the national heroes?
WCS 2012 was really good for a multitude of reasons. Blizzard hosted a separate WCS event in every single relevant region. each National and Continental event was segregated by region, which is how it should have been done in the first place. The only time when intercontinental competition truly mattered was during the WCS Global Finals in Shanghai.
The reason why WCS 2012 worked, The International 2 worked and why LCS is working is this:
- Region segregation. Did we see PartinG soul train WCS SEA because the competition was considered far easier than elsewhere? No. PartinG had to qualify through WCS Korea then WCS Asia and finally WCS 2012. The same was for WCG. He qualified under Korea - no other country. Likewise we don't see Najin Shield ripping apart LCS Europe and we didn't see Chinese teams ripping apart the Western qualifiers for TI2.
- It interfered with no other tournament. What Blizzard did with WCS 2013 was commandeer every other tournament and make other leagues sign agreements not to clash with any WCS event. LCS had similar rules but did not otherwise interfere with any other league. Valve had no such rules over The International 2. They just aimed to kick off an amazing event and got people to watch that instead through this pure aim.
Where the hell is China?
If anybody has been following the Chinese scene's advancement in WCS America (specifically Comm's and MacSed's), you'll know they are some very capable players who could easily compete with Korea. After WCS 2012 being hosted in Shanghai, Blizzard has figuratively flipped off one of the biggest regions. HotS isn't even released in the People's Republic of China yet and one of the biggest markets for eSports outside of Korea is being neglected.
Enough has already been said of Comm's disqualification.
And WHY BLIZZCON?
Another huge criticism towards WCS 2013 I made evident in my last post on the topic and was shot down by was hosting the WCS 2013 finals at Blizzcon. Does anybody else not see a problem with this?
SOURCE: http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/blizzcon-2013-tickets-sold-out
Hope you were one of the lucky ones, since both batches of Blizzcon 2013 Tickets sold out today in customarily instantaneous fashion.
Keep an eye on the BlizzCon website for updates on panels, exhibits, events, Virtual Ticket info, and more.
As the blue says, the last chance (other than via scalpers, and tix are already $500+ on ebay) is coming up on May 1st and those are CHOC Benefit Dinner tickets which include Blizzcon passes as well. Those are $500 a piece, limit 2 per household, and you get to attend a fancy charity dinner where you’ll meet lots of Blizzard people and receive a warm fuzzy permabuff to your charitable impulses.
Did anyone score tickets today? I’m going this year and hope to see some of you guys there, for D3X’s big debut! *crossed fingers*
Apparently the tickets sold out even faster than usual this year, judging by reports from some friends who were able to buy tickets to the past few Blizzcons, but failed in their efforts this year. Pent up demand after no Blizzcon last year?
Keep an eye on the BlizzCon website for updates on panels, exhibits, events, Virtual Ticket info, and more.
As the blue says, the last chance (other than via scalpers, and tix are already $500+ on ebay) is coming up on May 1st and those are CHOC Benefit Dinner tickets which include Blizzcon passes as well. Those are $500 a piece, limit 2 per household, and you get to attend a fancy charity dinner where you’ll meet lots of Blizzard people and receive a warm fuzzy permabuff to your charitable impulses.
Did anyone score tickets today? I’m going this year and hope to see some of you guys there, for D3X’s big debut! *crossed fingers*
Apparently the tickets sold out even faster than usual this year, judging by reports from some friends who were able to buy tickets to the past few Blizzcons, but failed in their efforts this year. Pent up demand after no Blizzcon last year?
Note the words 'customarily instantaneous fashion', and 'sold out even faster than usual this year.' The problem with buying tickets for Blizzcon is you have to be the first in the queue immediately after the tickets become available, or else you might not even be able to get them. A really big problem was that people who entered mere minutes after the page came up ended up with almost hour long queues where they were certain not to buy tickets.
Also, the big problem with hosting the WCS 2013 finals at Blizzcon is that a vast majority of the attendees probably aren't big Starcraft fans, let alone fans of the competitive scene. Congratulations, you've just locked out a lot of US fans who would have liked to visit Anaheim and watch the best SC2 players duke it out in favour of WoW and Diablo fans. A Blizzard convention may have seemed fitting at first glance but one seems to forget that Blizzcon is very exclusive and far more difficult to get tickets for than say... Dreamhack or MLG.
How can Blizzard improve WCS from here:
This will be divided into three different categories. Short-term, as in immediate fixes, Mid-term, as in fixes this year, and Long-term, as in fixes next year.
Short Term Fixes:
- Offer a formal apology to all Chinese pros who were either disqualified or who were denied seeds into WCS America's qualifiers. In Sundance's apology over the WCS America qualifiers, he did not even acknowledge the plight of Chinese players let alone offer to atone for it.
- Offer Comm either a free Premier or Challenger Division seed into WCS America as an apology for the unfair DQ or force a best of 3 rematch between him and TheStC, his last obstacle who received a walkover when Comm was DQ'd. Winner gets the seed that Comm could have potentially won.
- Extend the size of the WCS America qualification bracket for both the Challenger Division qualifier and for future qualifiers. MLG have not learned from their mistake and the upcoming Challenger Division qualifiers will once again be another single 512 man double elimination bracket.
- Give those who were one round away from qualifying for WCS America's Premier Divsion free seeds into the Challenger Division, i.e. DeMusliM.
Mid Term Fixes:
- Drop the rule against events clashing. It's very anti-competitive. Why else are NASL considering going into Dota 2 instead? Let them host NASL Season 5 for god's sake!
- Implement a points system for qualification spread across multiple qualifiers similar to what TSL and Dreamhack has. Start this system of qualification for WCS 2013 Seasons 2 and 3.
- Make each qualifier online. Even WCS Korea.
- Host the WCS 2013 finals at their own event, ideally in a large capacity arena similar to IEM Katowicz and Dreamhack.
Long Term Fixes:
- Host WCS 2014 as entirely separate events.
- Include a Chinese and SEA division to correspond with all Battle.net regions.
- Keep the format of WCS 2013. Dual Tournament, week to prepare, three seasons.
