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 Zoun and Cure qualify from Korea, Serral and Reynor qualify from Europe, Trigger qualify from the Americas, and Firefly qualify from Asia.The remaining qualification spots for EWC 2025 will be decided through Code S Season 2 (1 spot), BGE Stara Zagora (1 spot), and the online Global Qualifier (4 spots). Korea Qualifier ![[image loading]](/staff/Waxangel/EWC2025/krqualifier.png) Europe Qualifier ![[image loading]](/staff/Waxangel/EWC2025/euqualifier.png) Americas Qualifier ![[image loading]](/staff/Waxangel/EWC2025/amqualifier.png) Asia Qualifier ![[image loading]](/staff/Waxangel/EWC2025/asqualifier.png) 
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Mizenhauer
United States1819 Posts
![[image loading]](https://tl.net/userfiles/354073.jpg?1688656831) | ||
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tigera6
3290 Posts
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dedede
United States36 Posts
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sevengraff
United States8 Posts
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MJG
United Kingdom889 Posts
Do those spots drop further down into the GSL ranks, or are extra seeds offered for tournaments that players qualified via GSL did well in? | ||
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tigera6
3290 Posts
On June 02 2025 15:34 MJG wrote: Do we know how the GSL seeds will work when most of the players at the top end of GSL have already qualified through one of the other qualification routes? Do those spots drop further down into the GSL ranks, or are extra seeds offered for tournaments that players qualified via GSL did well in? According to what I heard during DH Dallas (tie-breaking match if herO beat Maru in Ro8), the spot will drop further down into this GSL final rank. Basically the highest rank among Rogue-Bunny-Gumiho will get the spot. | ||
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luxon
United States111 Posts
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Kreuger
Sweden686 Posts
On June 02 2025 15:55 luxon wrote: is maxpax playing anything this year? DH was in person, and qualifiers have no prize $ so that makes sense, but are there online tourneys with $ that he'll be playing. Also how does it work if someone who qualified already wins another spot (eg herO or clem win another premier), does it go to the next highest placer or is there some play in? Plays all the weeklys atleast. Wardii has some larger online aswell. Other then that I dont know really. | ||
Waxangel
United States33291 Posts
On June 02 2025 15:34 MJG wrote: Do we know how the GSL seeds will work when most of the players at the top end of GSL have already qualified through one of the other qualification routes? Do those spots drop further down into the GSL ranks, or are extra seeds offered for tournaments that players qualified via GSL did well in? Via EWC admin in LP Discord, the seed will roll down to whoever is next in line (they will hold tiebreakers if necessary). | ||
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MJG
United Kingdom889 Posts
On June 02 2025 16:39 Waxangel wrote: Via EWC admin in LP Discord, the seed will roll down to whoever is next in line (they will hold tiebreakers if necessary). I should've just looked at the LP Discord first lmao. Thanks!  | ||
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Harris1st
Germany6854 Posts
EWC is starting to pick up pace Who is missing most in the lineup? Who do you want to have at EWC? I'm hoping for one of my fellow Germans, maybe Astrea and GumiGod! | ||
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dysenterymd
1193 Posts
On June 02 2025 16:39 Waxangel wrote: Via EWC admin in LP Discord, the seed will roll down to whoever is next in line (they will hold tiebreakers if necessary). If it's the same for BGE, with Serral/Reynor/Clem already qualified, fourth place is probably bagging a spot (Zoun/Trigger could make good runs but are already qualified, in which case I guess it would roll down to 5th/6th.) That's probably going to be Showtime, but Lambo/Skillous/Spirit/Reyung have an outside shot. | ||
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PrinCess-Zerg
3 Posts
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Blitzball04
187 Posts
On June 02 2025 18:35 Harris1st wrote: And Bellum Gens right around the corner! EWC is starting to pick up pace Who is missing most in the lineup? Who do you want to have at EWC? I'm hoping for one of my fellow Germans, maybe Astrea and GumiGod! I’m okay with heromarine making it since sometimes he can go on a surprise run Showtime I already given up on any expectation since he always perform exactly as ppl expect him to perform. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland24751 Posts
On June 02 2025 16:39 Waxangel wrote: Via EWC admin in LP Discord, the seed will roll down to whoever is next in line (they will hold tiebreakers if necessary). Just based on this season or both? It bothered me last EWC and how it ended up where players could have identical results in a tournament, but based on what tournament they did it in they’d qualify or not, potentially. At least they didn’t do as much retroactive qualifying spots which I really did not like. At least this time players mostly know what they need to do in advance. | ||
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Antithesis
Germany1137 Posts
Felt bad for Skillous. He tweeted that he did nothing but practice for the past two months, not going out at all, and still failed to qualify. It's sometimes easy to overlook how brutal the SC2 scene, despite its much-bemoaned downscaling, is for anyone but the S-tier pros. Serral walking 13-1 through the qualifier (18-1 when including the open bracket) is effectively a matter of course, indeed someone in the GoaT thread used it to illustrate the comparative lack of competition, while the rest of the field must fight their heart out for the few remaining spots. Creator and ShowTime both got sweeped three maps in a row while on match point in their last respective games. Sort of characteristic for the two, but still surely incredibly frustrating. | ||
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dedede
United States36 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland24751 Posts
On June 03 2025 07:52 Antithesis wrote: Zoun making it through the Korean qualifier first place is doubtlessly the biggest surprise. Felt bad for Skillous. He tweeted that he did nothing but practice for the past two months, not going out at all, and still failed to qualify. It's sometimes easy to overlook how brutal the SC2 scene, despite its much-bemoaned downscaling, is for anyone but the S-tier pros. Serral walking 13-1 through the qualifier (18-1 when including the open bracket) is effectively a matter of course, indeed someone in the GoaT thread used it to illustrate the comparative lack of competition, while the rest of the field must fight their heart out for the few remaining spots. It’s rough, it’s made even rougher by squashing the vast majority of qualification into such a short period. It’s always going to be rough, but at least with more of a season, earning points you can get in by consistently performing and afford one bad day at the office or two. Regulars to the site will know, and are probably sick of me complaining about how EWC is organised, and does qualifying. This year is no exception :p Last year my main gripe was really that different seasons of the same tournaments gave different amounts of slots. And it was done part-retrospectively as well. Some players got slots for Ro4 or whatever one season, others did not in another season. It ended up being quite a minor gripe as ultimately those players qualified anyway in the end, but I do think that was a potential fairness issue. This year, stupid, stupid amount of delay. That as yet I’ve really heard no great explanation for, and the problems that’s causing. Bellum Stara Zagora, great tournament, love to see it, think it’s cool it has that extra prize of EWC dangling. I was very tempted to go but my partner wanted to go to Italy rather than to an SC tournament, how dare she! However, qualifying for that tournament was done in the period of no-information stasis. Some players were inactive, some were keeping ticking over, but not grinding hard. Waiting to see what the future held. Some even forfeited spots. You basically end up with the players who qualified and decided to go to that event, having an extra shot at an EWC qualification. A shot which was not part of the calculation for anyone because at the time it wasn’t a prize being dangled. Heromarine didn’t even play the Europe qualifiers. The Asian qualifier had four players, and Maru apparently played Protoss. Realistically, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that you don’t get bigger, stronger qualifying competition for that tournament if an EWC ticket is on the line. I might not be interested in the blind date my friend is trying to sell me, if I find out later it was with a supermodel I’d be kicking myself! It depends if they will count back at this tournament as well and award a slot, I don’t actually know if that is the plan for this one. If it is, and with 5/16 of the field already qualified (Zoun, Serral, Clem, Reynor, trigger), it’s entirely possible that a tourney with a weaker field than many gives an EWC slot almost based on brackets and who can either avoid a Serral/Clem, or win a few series. I don’t think that’s a winning combination myself. Also while I don’t like retrospectively awarding direct qualification to tournaments already played, unless they’re one of a series (I.e. two GSL seasons), perhaps some recognition for past tournaments in this interim is due? Masters Colosseum had a really solid field and a decent prize pool, maybe it should award some ranking points? HSC less stacked sure, but maybe Gumiho gets some points for winning that thing instead of nothing. I think some kind of points ranking alleviates another issue. With a straight win your ticket at the event system, the order of who qualifies becomes more important. It’s always somewhat, but it’s more so. Let’s take Serral. Wins a few A/B tier events, his usual high placement elsewhere. Places only top 8 at Dallas, not enough for qualification, so enters the EU qualifiers, then goes to Bellum already qualified. So now we end up in a situation where EU player x who isn’t going to Bellum has to beat Serral to qualify. Whereas EU player y who has merely has to potentially get further than their competition, and hope to avoid those already qualified in the bracket. If we went with some kind of points system, weighted for tournament tier, Serral’s got like a B tier win, an A tier win, some Ro4s, and an S tier Ro8. There’s zero chance unless the way you weighted tournaments was insane that he wouldn’t be qualified for EWC by Dallas. I dunno how I’d fix it minus slightly expanding eligible tournaments and going with more a points-based system. the main problem isn’t formats, it’s months and months without informations You could also still offer direct qualification to EWC from tournament placement alongside points. Just don’t offer the rollback. Whatever the benchmark is, you have to hit it. If a player does, they just qualify and sidestep points. If a player does not, it’s the point ranking. So say, Bellum Stargoza offers a slot for the winner. I’d say, Showtime who’s amongst the best non-qualified there, actually wins it, man send that guy straight to EWC! You’d have to be playing out of your mind to beat the field, especially the Serral/Clem/Reynor field. If a player doesn’t hit that benchmark, do something else with those slots. Stick it into the EU/Global point race, or perhaps if you end up with enough, do some seeded qualifiers with the slots or whatever. Jesus this rant went on and on, I can only apologise! | ||
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JJH777
United States4391 Posts
Though one aspect that was still unclear until very recently is that the seed would just roll down to the highest placing player not already qualified. There were rumors I've seen posted both here and Reddit that slots in that scenario would go to the global qualifier not just roll down in the same event which turned out to be incorrect and I wonder if that impacted players decisions to participate. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland24751 Posts
On June 03 2025 10:52 JJH777 wrote: To the above post one minor correction is the wildcard qualifier for Bellum was played after the announcement that it would have an EWC seed and still had pretty abysmal participation for some reason. I initially made the same exact complaint you just made except on Reddit that it wasn't fair to the players to have an event award and EWC seed when that wasn't known at the time the qualifier was running. Someone replied and pointed out the wildcard qualifier was going to be played after so I thought that was at least better than nothing but very few top players actually participated. I was shocked we didn't see a lot of the top Koreans go for it even if you have to pay your own travel for the chance at an EWC slot. Though one aspect that was still unclear until very recently is that the seed would just roll down to the highest placing player not already qualified. There were rumors I've seen posted both here and Reddit that slots in that scenario would go to the global qualifier not just roll down in the same event which turned out to be incorrect and I wonder if that impacted players decisions to participate. Thanks for the correction! I’d assumed the wildcard was to replace some of the forfeits, and wasn’t done after the EWC announcement. Checking here the wild card did occur after the EWC reveal, by approx 3 weeks. Although from memory I can’t remember what the gap was between ‘EWC is back’ and ‘here’s how you qualify’. It is still possible that the latter only occurred after the wild card, which tbh looking at the field seems more likely to me. If I am wrong, I stand corrected but my guess is that the Redditor who pointed this out to you was correct on the EWC announcement date, but assumed that how qualification would happen occurred around the same time. I’m not sure it did, just from memory I think there was at least SOME lag. There is also the possibility that, signups close. So maybe the signup deadline passed, EWC announcement, then qualifiers actually happen. Tbh I think that’s also unlikely, if EWC qualification suddenly became a factor, I’d imagine they’d re-open them. Aside from anything else they want their tournament to attract the best field possible. Unless stuff like this is privately communicated to the relevant stakeholders and we just don’t hear of it, which is possible I do find it frustrating how little myself, or you or whoever posts regularly here definitively know about certain things. These should be questions that someone who occasionally dips their toes in and loves the big tournaments might have, not somebody like me who, on current trajectories may just become a disembodied consciousness who lives on TL in a few years. As a big general sports fan, generally once some new tournament is announced, or tweaks to formats are made, there is no room for speculation, only ‘is this a good thing’? The World Cup in football is being expanded. I know how that tournament is structured years out, I know the ratios of who qualifies from which regions, and I know which cross-continent playoff tiebreaks will occur. As someone who doesn’t follow other eSports, I wonder if there’s near these levels of confusion on these kind of questions for other titles who’ll be played out at EWC It’s just frustrating. Look, I’m pretty on-record in not being a fan of Gamers8 and EWC for other reasons, but, while it does somewhat augment some of my criticisms from those domains, I’d really rather not be also moaning about things like tournament format (like come on what was that format last year?) and qualification formats and basic communication. For those who have ethical issues and don’t wanna watch, fair fucks, I’m still on the fence again this year. For those who just want the best SC2 possible, I’d rather they get that, personally. Whether one agrees with all of Blizz’s and subsequently old ESL’s calls in terms of structure and how to distribute the monies, organisationally it’s night and day really | ||
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Balnazza
Germany1120 Posts
As someone who doesn’t follow other eSports, I wonder if there’s near these levels of confusion on these kind of questions for other titles who’ll be played out at EWC No, not really. EWC was and is just a collosal mess. Just a remember: Last year, we didn't know how the EPT Championship would look basically until the end of the year. Throughout 2023 players played for EPT points and had no idea how much they would actually need/what place they would need to hit and where they would even go. I understand that the EWC announcement was a bit of a secret, but it was still silly. Other Esports are much more organized in that regard, which kind of makes sense, because SC2 is in a bit of a unique space. But just a few examples: LoL (and Valorant) run a full circuit through the year, so everything is mostly planned out way ahead. For the first time in a while the LoL Worlds are not fully flashed out, they will get a new system this year (since they have been downsized from 20 to 17 teams), but atleast every team in every region knows the path to qualification. Counterstrike implemented a new system this year, called the Valve Ranking. The system itself is controversial, but it basically structurs all invites months ahead. So for example, the current June Ranking decided the invites for IEM Cologne at the end of July. Even Age of Empires, which does not have any kind of real circuit in any of its entries, is still relatively structured. There is a Tournament Director working for Microsoft who is in charge of giving out the funds from MS/Worlds Edge/Forgotten Empires to TOs. Because of hat, there is an event calendar that features all bigger events in AoE 1 to AoM (so essentially six games!) throughout the year. Sometimes even events that aren't announced, so it could just be "AoE 2 S-Tier 1v1 Event in July" or something like that as a placeholder. That way though, most players know throughout the entire year when what will be played, which is particularly important considering how few players actually play all the AoE games full time. | ||
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tigera6
3290 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland24751 Posts
On June 03 2025 23:23 tigera6 wrote: As frustrating as the qualification process is, I think we got the correct player pool for EWC this year. Most of the big names already qualified or in the Global Qualifier, with the exception of a few like Rogue/Gumiho who still has a chance to make it. I think broadly yeah we have so far, which doesn’t limit my moaning but the end results are pretty much who you’d expect. Dunno why it didn’t occur to me before now, there is one further solution that would be cool, although I imagine not viable at that venue. Open bracket to get into the main tournament proper and face those who qualified already. If you’re going to have basically one mega tournament, that would be sick. Yes, yes I know, complete pipe dream :p | ||
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Balnazza
Germany1120 Posts
On June 03 2025 23:53 WombaT wrote: I think broadly yeah we have so far, which doesn’t limit my moaning but the end results are pretty much who you’d expect. Dunno why it didn’t occur to me before now, there is one further solution that would be cool, although I imagine not viable at that venue. Open bracket to get into the main tournament proper and face those who qualified already. If you’re going to have basically one mega tournament, that would be sick. Yes, yes I know, complete pipe dream :p Honestly, not a fan of that idea for the "World Championship". I know the "Circuit" is extremly short this year, but still. If you can just show up and qualify it doesn't have the same gravitas as having to work before to qualify | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland24751 Posts
On June 04 2025 00:09 Balnazza wrote: Honestly, not a fan of that idea for the "World Championship". I know the "Circuit" is extremly short this year, but still. If you can just show up and qualify it doesn't have the same gravitas as having to work before to qualify When we had two WCs it was great. Katowice was the one where you could be on a hot streak coming in and do well. Blizzcon/WCS was the one where you had to be solid all year to make it. I’m fine with both approaches, and to have two WCs with a slightly different niche was cool If a ton of non-qualified players turned up for a last-chance qualifier, offline, and made it through the gauntlet is that really lacking the gravitas of (potentially) being the highest placed player in a 16 man field at Bellum who hasn’t already qualified, when 5 players already have? I’d feel rather differently if this had been announced months ago, more tournaments were incorporated, and players knew more in advance of how to qualify. Maru played Protoss in an Asian qualifier with 4 participants, qualified and forfeited his spot. That just doesn’t happen if it’s known at the time that here’s a potential EWC ticket. It was a sensible call at the time for some to skip it, prize pool isn’t huge, Clem and Serral and Reynor are there, you might be losing money playing that tourney. Maybe not a call some make if it’s a good shot at EWC and guaranteed cash just for showing up there. Of players not qualified, I think maybe only Gumiho not making it would feel a bit ‘unfair’ to me as he’s won an HSC, albeit not the most stacked we’ve ever seen, and made a GSL Ro4, so he has some results others don’t have despite not quite getting over the line yet. He may still yet though. Others if they fail to make it, I wouldn’t say it’s unfair but given SC2 is seemingly now one giant tournament in the desert, it’s a shame they won’t be. Come on, something like military veteran Rogue, gradually getting his powers of old back, seizing the last chance of the open bracket and going on a tear would be sick city! And I’m not even a fan (although not an antifan either) This EWC structure is absurdly, absurdly top-heavy. Which is fine if you’re Serral, or Clem. You’re a level above most, you’re going to qualify. Lost in the sauce a bit is that the ‘middle class’ of pros, you’re A and B tiers are very, very close in level. And there’s a lot in that class. This is fine if it’s a 50/50 toss up matchup for glory. At this point it’s basically a 50/50 match where it’s financially viable for the winner to be a progamer, and the other not. With that in mind, the more shots someone has to make it, the better. Of course this is coming from a PoV of a big StarCraft fan. Very few moves made by the organisation behind Gamers8/EWC are moves I’d have made, and i imagine that’s an opinion shared by many. But of course this isn’t any endeavour or passion, or even commercial viability really. | ||
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non-trivial
1 Post
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