If you read my Twitter and Facebook, or if you watch any of the various shows I appear on, you may have heard me over the course of the past several months mention a project that has been in the making for quite a while now. Well, I am excited to share the details behind this project with you as we are finally ready to launch! Today, I am proud to announce the SC2L (StarCraft® II League), Powered by D-Link! Our goal with the SC2L is to create a consistent, high-quality team league for the organizations in the West. We want the SC2L to become the Western world's premier team league.
Why the team format? Well, while we are fortunate enough to have plenty of great 1v1 tourneys and leagues available to us in the West, the landscape for team-based competition isn't nearly as strong. We feel it is important to support and feature the West's best team organizations, and in doing so help improve the quality of competition in the West, and the Western scene at large. This is why we are pushing as hard as we can to be the premier team league in the West.
SC2L's first season will be about two months long, and it will feature eight of the West's top teams (including Western team organizations that have Korean players) competing in the traditional ProLeague format (best of 7 rounds, one map per round). Joining us this season will be Liquid, ROOT, MouseSports, Acer, Axiom, EG, and Na`Vi, with Dignitas and compLexity competing as one joint team. Season 1 will be a single round-robin (meaning every team plays every other team once), leading into an online playoff. The final two teams standing after the online playoff will receive travel and hotel stipends to compete for the SC2L Season 1 Championship at DreamHack Bucharest, September 14th & 15th! With our Grand Finals match co-produced with DreamHack, so you can expect the same top-notch production value we've seen from DreamHack Open events over the years.
Our casting lineup for this season is really cool. SC2L Season 1 will be hosted and casted by some of the finest in the biz. I'll be your regular, everyday host and commentator and will be joined on a weekly basis by an amazing rotation of co-casters, which includes djWHEAT, Day[9], and Artosis. I'll be bringing the casts to you live from our studio in San Francisco, with our co-casters joining me remotely via voice and webcam.
Additionally, we are really excited and grateful to have D-Link as a new sponsor for SC2L Season 1. Without their support, we wouldn't be able to bring you the high-quality production and casters that will help make this league one of the best. Additionally, with D-Link's support, we are also proud to announce that SC2L Season 1 will feature one of the first crowd-sourced prize pools in StarCraft II.
How does that work, exactly? It's really simple. D-Link's coming out with an awesome new gaming router, and for every router our tournament's viewers pre-order, D-Link will add $10 to the prize pool. So while SC2L's prize pool will open at $10K, it can be doubled to $20K with the help of our viewers!
If you like what you've read so far, I'd ask that you please check out D-Link's new gaming router by visiting its Newegg.com profile page. If you're interested in purchasing it, make sure to enter promo code "DLNKGAME5" when you check out. By using this code, you'll get a discount on your purchase, and you'll add $10 to the SC2L prize pool!
SC2L's first broadcast will be tonight, July 9th, at 9PM PDT, featuring Day[9] and myself. I hope you'll all join us as we kick off what we hope will be an awesome team league! Also, if you'd like to read more about SC2L, check out our website at www.SC2L.gg !
Also, don't forget to check out our Season 1 YouTube Trailer!
Sincerely,
Geoff "iNcontroL" Robinson