After the April 3rd announcement of the new WCS system, TeamLiquid had an opportunity to conduct an interview with Mike Morhaime, CEO of Blizzard entertainment. We were also joined by Itzik Ben-Bassat, executive VP of global publishing, who was also present for the announcement in Korea.

Transcription by Antoine.

Waxangel, TeamLiquid.net: You made a lot of changes since last year. How do you rate WCS 2012 and what about it was satisfactory, and what about it was unsatisfactory that caused you to make so many changes this year?

Mike Morhaime: That's a really good question. Let's start with the things we liked about it. I think that WCS 2012 did a great job of giving visibility into local heroes that you might not otherwise have known about. We did a process towards the end, leading into the BWC where we partnered with the casters around the world, and basically they did all these interviews with all of the people attending the BWC, and there's some really awesome content that came out of that. You really got to know the people that were attending BWC if you took the trouble to watch those interviews.

I think there were some great events that came out of it. I think maybe one of the downsides though, is it was separate from everything else that was going on within the StarCraft 2 ecosystem. So we didn't leverage the effort that was already going in to making StarCraft 2 esports awesome. Instead of creating a single story line, we created an additional story line that was in parallel to everything else, but it wasn't the definitive story line for 2012. So as a spectator, trying to look and see who are the best players, and what's happening, I think we just gave you another narrative.

That's not really what we were intending to do. I think we wanted - what we want to do is leverage all the great stuff that's going on in the ecosystem and have it tell a story that somebody can follow throughout the year, and so you know how the best players, and your favorite players are doing throughout the year. You know what they need to do to get to the global finals. And at the end of the year, everybody winds up knowing who the best player in StarCraft 2 is.

It seemed that there was a focus last year though, to make WCS very grassroots. As many regions as possible, as many online qualifiers as possible, you're trying to get as many people as possible interested in playing StarCraft 2. That seemed to be a very big focus of last year's plan. This year, it seems to be more of a focus on getting people to watch StarCraft 2 as an eSport. Is that a correct assessment?

MM: Not really. I don't necessarily agree with that. I'm not sure that the structure of the tournament last year really got more people - I mean, I know I love playing StarCraft 2, but I'm never going to enter one of these tournaments. The people that were entering those tournaments weren't playing StarCraft 2 because of WCS. I think that having open qualification was a really important part of WCS and it continues to be so now, so we will have open qualifications for our regional leagues.

But I think that right now, without the new WCS structure, I think that the foreign players are at a big disadvantage to the Koreans. They're traveling a lot, they don't necessarily have the same level of competition on a daily basis without coming to Korea, and so you'll see a lot of foreign players coming to Korea to really train and be with some of the top players. It's very disciplined out here. And the Korean players don't travel, with a few exceptions, don't travel as much as the foreign players. So we wanted to create an environment that gave North American, well, American and European players an ecosystem that provided some amount of stability. So we're gonna have equal point distribution in all 3 leagues, equal prize distribution in all 3 leagues, and so it'll be viable for pro-players to be in any region.

Itzik Ben-Bassat: I also think that you're right, that in 2013 we're trying to create an easier viewership experience. We're trying to create an easier story line, and through our partnership with Twitch, we're trying to create an easier viewership experience. So it's absolutely true that the focus was also on making it easy to watch, easy to follow, easy to understand.

MM: Yeah, actually that's a really good point. I think that accessibility of viewership is a theme. That it was one of our goals, with new WCS. There are some very important things that we're doing differently here in Korea: StarCraft 2 will be on television 5 days a week now. Internationally there are some very important things. I think that there will be free live stream in hi-def on Twitch for all WCS tournaments. You know, if you look back at 2012, there were a lot of tournaments going on, but some of them really required a subscription in order to view a decent feed. Some of them were free but the quality was not always there, and so now we have a regularly scheduled, accessible hi-def feed, and allow people to view that for free. And then if you want 1080p, okay, maybe then you pay a little bit more.

You said it would add stability for players in the European and American regions. But on the other hand, there's players like Naniwa, Scarlett, or Huk, who had the option to play in GSL and live in Korea, and also go around the world and play in all the big tournaments as well.

Now they're left in some sort of difficult position where their career opportunities are a little bit more difficult. They want to be in Korea to practice, but at the same time, they're in a weird spot where Naniwa would probably prefer to play in WCS Europe for his chances of qualifying for the regional finals and world finals. So in that aspect, do you think it's become more difficult for players to go to Korea now that they feel like "I have to stay in my region to practice now"?

MM: Hopefully what will happen is, it will actually take away some of the necessity for coming to Korea for practice.

IBB: Yeah. I think it's speculation at this point. I would say the exact opposite picture. What if some of the Korean players will decide they have better chances to win WCS Europe, and decide to play in Europe, and they go, and they practice in Europe with European players, and the competition there is becoming better. We hope that we would see that transformation of players. That's the reason we didn't restrict any of the regions. We want to see that transformation of players between different regions, or the transfer of players between the regions. And we want to see the players improving each other.

You're accurately describing the situation today. Very high level of gameplay in Korea, not good enough gameplay in Europe, and some of the things that we're doing is, we're trying to increase that level of play in Europe and in the US. You'll see that the leagues are equal. The European league, the American league, and the Korean league are equal in terms of prizes, and we hope that it will create a better distribution of quality of players between the different regions.

Well along that line again, there's a lot of players who feel the reason it's best to be in Korea to practice is because the best players are here, and it's the region that has the best ladder. And it's those games you play on ladder and in practice that help you improve, not necessarily the games you play during the tournament that help you improve. So it may just be that Korean players play their league games in NA, and then they wipe the Americans, and Americans, they're not getting better by losing to them in those games. They would still maybe need to go to Korea and practice there to get better. What are your thoughts on that?

MM: I'm not an expert on the practice, or the training regimen that the Koreans have, but I think that my understanding is that a lot of their training is actually playing against each other even more so than playing against the ladder, because they're guarding their strategies so much. I don't think that they're gonna wanna necessarily play with their best strategies against other people on the ladder.

I'm sure you heard this when you were at WCS Global Finals in China, but another concern is that a lot of the representatives from regions like South America, they said WCS was kind of a godsend for their scene. It was something that really helped revive a scene that was kind of dying off. It created interest, it created reason for their best players to start playing seriously again. And I'm sure it's not just there, it's like South East Asia, there are some regions that are probably being left out. Are there any plans to cater to these regions?

MM: You know, hopefully what you'll see is, you'll see local-grown tournaments springing up. I think that there are still groups like World Cyber Games that does tournaments in a lot of different places. I think that these players will have opportunity to participate in WCS. South American players can enter the American league. We really thought a lot about what we should call this league, and we ultimately decided on American, not because it's a US league, but because we want it to represent North and South America.

IBB: And I think we should also, you know if we look at other sports, let's say that I'm a really good tennis player. And I play really well in the local Brazilian league. At some point, when I want to play in the top, the highest levels, I need to start traveling outside of Brazil, and play in different tournaments around the world. So I think that in the same way, you have it here. If someone is playing in Brazil, and they're getting into a really good level, wouldn't they want to play in the US league - or in the America league, or in the European league and try to compete against players that are better? I think that would happen.

Actually I think this is a question for you. I think you tweeted that in the case of a player like Sen, or especially good players who don't really fall into a particular region, there might be some considerations or some way for them to get into the WCS system easier. Any details on that?

IBB: I think Sen is a really particular case. So I think that we would need to understand that a little bit better to understand where he wants to compete, and to try and accommodate that. We're coming to it very open, with the hope that we can solve particular special cases like Sen's. Maybe he decided to compete in Taiwan for the league, but to participate in tournaments outside of Taiwan. Or maybe he decides to try his luck in the Korean league. We would need to understand it from him first.

So this is a considerable investment, of just like time, money, effort. I guess the question here is, what's the goal in a business sense? Of course everyone from a pride point of view would like their game to be a popular esport, to be known worldwide. But from a business point of view, what's the gain?

MM: Well, I think there is a benefit of exposure. I think that esports has the potential to expose more people to StarCraft and educate more people about multiplayer StarCraft and hopefully we attract more players. I think that certainly there's been an impact when you look at Brood War, and how long and how healthy that community was for many many years, and you can't separate that from esports. Esports played a huge role in that, and hopefully StarCraft 2 will have just as long and healthy a life.

So the season finals, you're going to have 3 before the global finals. There's going to be 1 in each region. Has it been determined who's going to do the production, the operations for each of those?

IBB: The grand slams? Yeah, the grand slams are - so, MLG is going to do the Grand Slams in the US, and ESL will do that in Europe, and here in Korea I believe it's OGN.

MM: It's OGN this year, next year they'll each run one.

Are you concerned about - even now, the players who are lucky enough to be on well-funded teams get to go to more events. And now, even though the WCS events will probably have more points, if you allow points to be earned in IEMs, Dreamhacks, et cetera, are you afraid of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer in those terms? Like a player like MC will almost certainly qualify for an event if he keeps going on this pace earning points everywhere.

MM: Yeah, so, we don't want to get too much into the points system today. But we will have to announce that very soon. And one of the things we've been talking about is having a cap at how many points you can earn in a year, because... I don't know what the cap is going to be, I think we will have to. We're still talking about that internally, but we do want the players that are doing really well in the league to do really well. We want people to be encouraged to go to some of these events, but I think like you say, it's not about going around to all of these events and not doing well in WCS. If you do that, it's probably not going to get you as far as you'd want.

Last year, a lot of people would say Dreamhack ran the best WCS tournament out of everything, and this year they're notably missing. What's the reason behind that, and is there any chance that perhaps they'd get involved down the line, like producing a one-off event, et cetera?

IBB: So first of all, I think if you ask us for our personal opinion, we loved the way that they ran WCS Europe finals. It was awesome. It was unbelievable. We have a lot of respect for DreamHack. They're an important partner to Blizzard and they will continue being an important partner with Blizzard. The reality is that we had to choose one partner that fits all the different criteria that we had for who's gonna be the best partner in that region.

MM: For the league.

IBB: For the league. And it includes a lot of different things, like, having a studio or other criteria that I can get into. So eventually we decided that ESL is more suitable for what we were looking for in 2013, but it doesn't say that we're not going to continue working with DreamHack. We have every intention to continue working with them, and continue partnering to create great events like the ones that they create. They're one of the best esports organizations in the world.

It's been shown, that online events do not have the pull of live events, yet America and Europe will be held online mostly. During the planning phase, were you thinking about, "is there a way to hold this live?" Are you thinking about how you can hold this live further down the line? And what are your concerns regarding holding it online?

IBB: I think that our goal is to have as many offline events as well. We think they're awesome. We would love to have a studio with access to live audience, like GOM has here in Korea, like OGN has here in Korea. We still don't have that in North America and Europe. It's something that we would be looking into to see how we can do that with our partners, MLG and ESL. But we had to start somewhere, and to create all these matches in offline events would basically mean a lot of traveling for players. And that was impossible for 2013. In Korea, specifically, everyone lives in Seoul, everyone competes in Seoul, so it's really easy to do it. But just imagine how we'd do something like this in America, it's a little bit more complicated. So we are aware that offline events are awesome and they generate a lot of audience excitement, we love those events, we go to these events ourselves. But at least for 2013 we would need to do some of these matches online.

Last year, you held the finals in China, which was an interesting decision. This year you're going back to BlizzCon. How have your views changed on the Chinese market regarding not just StarCraft 2, or other games in general? What made you go back to BlizzCon?

MM: Well, it was always our intention to hold the Global Finals at BlizzCon. We took the decision last year, we kind of had an opportunity - every year, there's all these requests to hold BlizzCon outside of North America, and we've been wanting to hold an event in China for a long time, and so we thought that that was just a really good opportunity. The timing lined up so that we had an opportunity to hold an event in China, to hold a BlizzCon outside of California is just really difficult.

If you've ever been to BlizzCon you know that the entire Blizzard development team across all of our products basically is there. We put on all these panels, and so to call something BlizzCon and not have that level of Blizzard Support, there's an expectation mismatch I think that we would feel we weren't providing. And so, you know, we knew that it was sort of a one-time event, that it was gonna be esports focused, last year, and now we're all ready for another BlizzCon. We're really excited about it, and you know, hopefully our future finals will occur at BlizzCons and we won't skip any more years. I can't predict the future, but we love BlizzCon.

So this is a plan until 2014. So 2014 you might said there be some things coming up regarding how the team leagues might play into this. Going even further, could you see regions expanding beyond the three continents and encompassing more things?

MM: It's something that we would love to see. I think we're going to just see how the various markets evolve. If we start seeing that other regions develop an esports ecosystem that can produce enough top-level players to justify having a standalone WCS league running there.

Alright I'll wrap since we're running out of time. I'll give you a player question: Give me your shoutouts to whoever you need to, and thank whoever you want.

MM: Well I want to thank TL for coming out to Korea, and it's really great having you guys here. I've been following your live tweets when I have a chance, and I think you've been doing a really good job clarifying matters and answering people's questions. We feel very lucky that we have so many great partners around the world, and are really excited about esports in 2013.

IBB: Yeah, just echoing Mike, it's been great to work with six different companies. This is a seven entity cooperation around the world, and it's that the one thing you notice throughout the discussion is that everyone has the same goal, which is to make StarCraft II esports successful. And that's what made this happen. So I want to thank KeSPA, OGN, Gom here in Korea, ESL, MLG, and Twitch, who I think are doing a great job not just with professional esports, but also with community esports. We just feel very lucky that we have the opportunity to be a part of this, to and we enjoy being a part of this community.