Blizzard just announced the date and location of the European Battle.net Invitational. As per the announcement it will take place next month, on August 6 and 7 in Warsaw, Poland.
Fortunately, for those not living in Poland, ESL TV is providing a free HD stream of the event. Sadly, only eight players will participate in the tournament (players to be announced; I suppose those will be the highest ranking players of the ladder)
Europe’s top StarCraft II and World of Warcraft arena players will clash at the 2011 European Battle.net Invitational in Warsaw, Poland on August 6-7. You can experience two days of top-notch eSports action live in the Multikino within the Złote Tarasy commercial center in the heart of the Polish capital, or follow it all on the free HD live stream to find out who’ll be representing Europe later this year at the 2011 Global Battle.net Invitational at BlizzCon!
We’re inviting eight of the top StarCraft II players and eight of the best World of Warcraft 3v3 arena teams from all over Europe to compete for more than $50,000 in prize money and highly prestigious spots at the 2011 Global Battle.net Invitational at BlizzCon in Anaheim, California.
Admission to the event will be free for the whole weekend. Join us at the venue and follow the action live on the big screen of the Multikino, meet fellow players and members of the Blizzard Community team and use the opportunity to play StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm in our free gaming area with your friends. We’ll run fun activities and contests over the weekend that’ll give you a shot at winning cool prizes of your own.
Sign up for the event on our Facebook event page to meet other players who will be attending! If you can’t make it to the event, you don’t have to miss out: there will be a free live stream in HD quality hosted by ESL TV together with live coverage on Facebook, Twitter and right here on our site. Stay tuned for more details on the tournament and be sure to come back often, as we’ll update you with the list of participating players, teams, brackets and more in the weeks to come.
This is kinda cool, but I do have to say using the ladder to invite people is stupid. Especially when the map pool is out of date (and by the look of the s3 test maps it will only go more that way).
Wonder if only EU citizens are allowed to join or anyone who has an account on the european servers is allowed to go. I guess only EU people, but never know and couldn't really get it 100% sure out of the text. (just because kiwikaki is high on europe and lalush on NA).
also of course plenty of people have accounts on both servers, could be an incentive for a double shot at qualifying for blizzcon
While it's probably more or less impossible to pick the true top 8 in EU, it's at least easy to pick eight deserving players. Still, I don't envy Blizzard of this task. It's a major brainfuck if anything.
On July 06 2011 02:26 Nifel wrote: While it's probably more or less impossible to pick the true top 8 in EU, it's at least easy to pick eight deserving players. Still, I don't envy Blizzard of this task. It's a major brainfuck if anything.
Thats why they should make it straight forward, no picking individual players (will lead to tons of bullshit why players x and y werent invited).
Say top8 GM will be invited, so anyone wanting a shot to go to blizzcon should ladder their ass of and top8 eventually deserves it
ps. i know ladder means jack shit, except in this case
I wonder what the map pool will be...either we will end up with blizzard's sucky new maps (or old ones with close position crap and what not), or they will have to admit they are in fact bad and use different maps.
After the introduction of Grandmasters, I have a lot more confidence that the top 8 of the ladder deserve to be top 8 of the ladder. Maybe they aren't the best players overall, but they're the top 8 best ladder-ers.
It is a bit sad that with Dreamhack and Homestory occurring so recently, a bunch of the tip-top players haven't been laddering. Maybe it's not such a problem for the EU kids, but for the American players who went to those events, their ladder ranking has dropped (or they dropped out of GM).
On July 06 2011 02:34 koppik wrote: After the introduction of Grandmasters, I have a lot more confidence that the top 8 of the ladder deserve to be top 8 of the ladder. Maybe they aren't the best players overall, but they're the top 8 best ladder-ers.
It is a bit sad that with Dreamhack and Homestory occurring so recently, a bunch of the tip-top players haven't been laddering. Maybe it's not such a problem for the EU kids, but for the American players who went to those events, their ladder ranking has dropped (or they dropped out of GM).
if not mistaken, HuK dropped. there are so many games played ina single day on GM ladders that if you dont ladder for 3 days straight youre pretty much out of it from what ive seen
On July 06 2011 02:00 Morta wrote: Warcraft 3 3vs3?Say whaaaaaaat!?
Definetly looking forward for some nice Starcraft 2 and Warcraft 3 action.Will be epic.
Wanna know who the "glorious 8" will be. :D
You had me really excited for like half a second and then I re-read it because I thought it said WoW and low and behold it does. Should have been tipped off by the 3v3 part, but ^_^ I suppose nobody plays warcraft 3 anymore anyways, but it'd be awesome to have some show matches between Grubby and Happy and Tod and all the other former wc3 professionals now playing sc2.
Not really looking forward to this though with the amount of players and the likely ladder map selection. Taking the top eight grandmaster players seems like a horrible idea for a tournament.
the mappool will be really interesting I guess. If they choose Blizzard maps - well than it's just a bad mappool, if they choose a good mappool than Blizzard officially is saying that their ladder pool sucks
Doesn't this overlap with Assembly? I wonder how this will pan out to be honest. If some of the players that plan to attend Assembly get picked it's going to be kind of awkward.
Now i just have to plan how in the world am i to persuade my boss to give me 4 days off-work (i'm a city buss driver and my whole vacation was already planned on september)... Things would be a lot more simple if Blizzard miracously placed this tourney in Gdynia
On July 06 2011 03:21 Masayume wrote: Doesn't this overlap with Assembly? I wonder how this will pan out to be honest. If some of the players that plan to attend Assembly get picked it's going to be kind of awkward.
No choice but to wait and see what happens now.
Yep, those tournaments overlap.
I'd say the players who have a chance to compete in Warsaw at the European Invitational will probably go there, since it has a larger price pool, plus the players get a chance to win a trip to Blizzcon and a spot in the Worldwide SC2 Invitational (which again has a high price pool as well)
I wonder if it's top 8 from season 2 or from season 3. If I recall correctly, in Warcraft 3 they always announced the date at which the top 8 is picked.
On July 06 2011 03:36 5ukkub wrote: Now i just have to plan how in the world am i to persuade my boss to give me 4 days off-work (i'm a city buss driver and my whole vacation was already planned on september)... Things would be a lot more simple if Blizzard miracously placed this tourney in Gdynia
Can always catch a nasty case of diarrhoea :D The clash is assembly kinda sucks if that is the case.
On July 06 2011 03:36 cyclone25 wrote: I wonder if it's top 8 from season 2 or from season 3. If I recall correctly, in Warcraft 3 they always announced the date at which the top 8 is picked.
Season 2 ends on July 20. Season 3 starts on the same day. The tournament is on August 6/7. It wouldn't make sense to base the invites on the ranking of season 3
Well this selection will show if they only care about the final score or who actually has dominated the ladder during the season (think Happy for EU, IdrA and Sheth for NA.)
On July 06 2011 04:38 TT1 wrote: i hope they dont do this for the us server cus of all the disc hacks, i was no5 on the server before i loss over 150 pts to disc hacks
Are we actually sure that they will take the Top8 from GrandMasters? I know that this is Blizzard we are talking and they want to promote their ladder, but it's not so hard to understand the problem with this system.
Maybe even Blizzard understand this and will make a system for the invitational that works?
I dont think going off of top x amount of players on the ladder will be a good thing, as especially with things like MLG and NASL finals soon, quite a few of the truely awsome players may be dedicating themselves to these This may mean that depending on their practicing styles they may be doing a whole load of customs for a specific matchup etc, this may mean they drop on the ladder due to other, more ladder-focused players will be higher up and get the inv Obviously if they are high GM then they are great and true to watch, yet an arbritary number of the top GM players may miss out on the more tournament stars, and these are the ones fun to watch
Blizzard will use a method that utilises their ladder in some way, yet maybe a win percentage, or MMR will do a better job than top x, and make a more enjoyable tournament to watch
HOLY SHIT I CAN'T BELIEVE. Starcraft 2 event in Poland, my home country. Of course its 300 km from where I live, but I'll do anything in my powers to be there :D
I'm really quite annoyed that Blizzard would even think to do a SC2 tournament considering the problems they have right now, especially based on something like the ladder.
They don't know what they want from their maps yet The massive problem of drophacking to name a few
They'll probably invite players from Top 50 GM based on availability and willingness to go.
i'd be happy with that. well kiwikaki is a NA player... so maybe he will not be invited. But the rest is all fine with me (kiwikaki will most likely attend NA bnet invite.. if there is one)
I guess with the new ladder reset, there will be a period in which players will be able to be picked up by Bnet. I mean, I don't know why you are giving names to seeds, when there has been a reset in the ladders and now, no one is GM. I think we have to wait the 2 week to determine who the players will be, not basing our seed in who the top 8 rank it is now.
WhiteRa is ~25 right now....dunno when you posted that list. From top 16 i see a few unknown players (at least to me, don't want to offend some fanboy )
On July 06 2011 16:50 Gotmog wrote: WhiteRa is ~25 right now....dunno when you posted that list. From top 16 i see a few unknown players (at least to me, don't want to offend some fanboy )
On July 06 2011 16:50 Gotmog wrote: WhiteRa is ~25 right now....dunno when you posted that list. From top 16 i see a few unknown players (at least to me, don't want to offend some fanboy )
@Gotmog You should know Tefel too, he is a solid zerg from Poland who regularly wins a online cup. DeathAngel is a zerg from Romania I believe. biGs is also a zerg from Switzerland and Vortix is from Spain and he is a brother of Lucifron. No idea about KrasS.
Heh, well sorry guys I just pasted a few of them i haven't seen much. I don't follow smaller tournaments, weekly cups etc. The point was that they are at least not as big names as Happy, Lalush, Ra, Kiwi etc etc.
Didn't say they are bad, just less knows or unknown to the majority. ^^
They should have a mini tournament to get qualified into this. An 8 man tournament is incredibly tiny. I really am hoping to see white-ra take this tournament though!!!
I'll be there! Also I'm looking foward for samsung european championship + WCG Poland at 6-9 october It will be really good year for polish esports events
so where are the guys who cried about blizzard warning TLO to not share account with Huk? what would have happened if huk got tlo #1, blizz invites him, and he declines cuz he cant even play ? rofl
On July 06 2011 18:31 whiteLotus wrote: so where are the guys who cried about blizzard warning TLO to not share account with Huk? what would have happened if huk got tlo #1, blizz invites him, and he declines cuz he cant even play ? rofl
We still have no idea how they're going to determine the top 8 players. It might be ladder rank, MMR, winrate etc or a combination of these. As for Nerchio, he has some 'issues' with lans and might not attend, even though it's in Poland.
On July 06 2011 18:31 whiteLotus wrote: so where are the guys who cried about blizzard warning TLO to not share account with Huk? what would have happened if huk got tlo #1, blizz invites him, and he declines cuz he cant even play ? rofl
We still have no idea how they're going to determine the top 8 players. It might be ladder rank, MMR, winrate etc or a combination of these. As for Nerchio, he has some 'issues' with lans and might not attend, even though it's in Poland.
Issues? What kind of issues? If it's the thing with exams, matura was in May...
AWESOME! Will be there :D. As other people are saying, hoping for some great casters. Blizzard usually hires Tastosis and/or Day9 for their events right? Would be great if this was the case for this one as well .
On July 06 2011 20:37 Widunder wrote: AWESOME! Will be there :D. As other people are saying, hoping for some great casters. Blizzard usually hires Tastosis and/or Day9 for their events right? Would be great if this was the case for this one as well .
Seeing as ESL TV will provide the stream, it wouldn't suprise me if they went with ESL casters, so Rotterdam + new US caster?
On July 06 2011 20:37 Widunder wrote: AWESOME! Will be there :D. As other people are saying, hoping for some great casters. Blizzard usually hires Tastosis and/or Day9 for their events right? Would be great if this was the case for this one as well .
Seeing as ESL TV will provide the stream, it wouldn't suprise me if they went with ESL casters, so Rotterdam + new US caster?
Ah, good point. Oh well, not bad either. ESL usually have good casters .
I always found the Battle.net invitationals really fun to watch. Blizzard always initiates an atmosphere of authenticity and professionalism, so I'm really looking forward to this.
As others have said, I hope there is a preliminary online bracket with the top 64/32 players from Grandmaster to determine the top 8. Would be fun if we could watch this via stream online.
Hopefully they have some online tournament (with a steam delayed by like 30 minutes) amongst the top of the ladder to see who actually qualifies for the invitational.
Pretty odd choice to have the event in Poland though, for various reasons.
On July 08 2011 08:07 Paladia wrote: Hopefully they have some online tournament (with a steam delayed by like 30 minutes) amongst the top of the ladder to see who actually qualifies for the invitational.
Pretty odd choice to have the event in Poland though, for various reasons.
It's not that odd since a lot of people plays SC2 in Poland and we have no lan events.
Good invites so far. Also, whether Nerchio can perform to his fullest in an "offline" tournament or not he's still a boss. The amazing play he's put up online is proof enough for me.
On July 29 2011 00:16 Finrod1 wrote: Gonna be very intresting how Nerchio does. It's gonna be his second lan after iem? Or is this before iem? Time to proove your skills "offline" nerchio
This LAN is before IEM. This LAN is next weekend (August 6-7). IEM is August 17-21 in Cologne. It's going to be a busy month!
I don't really understand why White Ra. Don't take me wrong, he is a very good player but he wasn't as good on the ladder as players like nerchio, thorzain or naniwa. I am pretty sure we will see Happy too. I don't know for the rest.
On July 29 2011 00:57 Cosmos wrote: I don't really understand why White Ra. Don't take me wrong, he is a very good player but he wasn't as good on the ladder as players like nerchio, thorzain or naniwa. I am pretty sure we will see Happy too. I don't know for the rest.
Thorzain good on ladder? WTF he didnt play more than 10 games on grandmaster next invites will be Tarson/Sase/Goody and Ret cause they all cancel Assembly. I wish they get Stephano cause he is top zerg in Eu along with Nerchio.
On August 02 2011 04:11 EtohEtoh wrote: arent Naniwa and thorzain supposed to be in Korea?
This was what I was thinking as well, but it seems they are going to Korea after this. Mr Chae posted this in the Code A qualifiers thread:
Lastly! Foreign players will be arriving to Korea through League Exchange Program with MLG. Fenix will be arriving on August 2nd and on August 9th, Naniwa and ThorZaIN will be arriving to play in Code A and Code A, and experience Korean e-sports.
Tarson Ret Socke Strelok White-Ra Nerchio Naniwa Thorzain
Yeah, it is on the event's main site. I was probably not precise enough, as I wanted to know if all the SC2 games will be played on one day or two (and therefore I need to plan a 2 day trip).
This explains a bit of what's going on with tournaments this weekend if people are confused about why players aren't where. Assembly Summer in Helsinki finishes tomorrow and for those who have watched that yesterday and the day before now you know where the extra players that were invited but did not go have gone (eg. Ret, WhiteRa, Tarson, I forget who else).
On August 05 2011 02:19 Rugged wrote: No dimaga?
Dimaga is in the final for Assembly Summer against Mana, they will be playing very soon on the stream you can see on the side of this site
I just wanted to offer my congratulations to everyone involved in the event. I spent the day ironing and watching the show, and it was an absolute blast!
Was a great event. Well organised with just a small delay and maybe too long breaks between the matches but otherwise really great. Fantastic players and an awesome audience, the location also looked nice. Way to go, Blizzard.
I'd like to thank everyone who shared this great experience with me, whether live or on stream. This event will certainly be one of my fondest memories. The ending was genuinely touching.
EPT
Sadly, only eight players will participate in the tournament (players to be announced; I suppose those will be the highest ranking players of the ladder)![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/mMmgR.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/iwWr8.png)
![[image loading]](http://www.fragster.de/de/esport/coverages/blizzcon/2011/invitational/eu/galerie/sonntag/sc2-blizzard-european-battle-net-invitational-1-carmac-buehne-naniwa-thorzain.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/AHZZ6.jpg)
