Dear TL Community,

156 days ago, soO joined IefNaij, NonY, ThorZaIN, and Creator on the list of TeamLiquid Starleague champions. For us, the team behind TSL, it was also a big day because it was the first time we could really say “we made it”. We’d brought TSL back and crowned a champion for the first time in eight years.

On top of that, we managed to create something that stood out. It was important to us to do things differently from other tournaments, and our artistic style and musical choices evoked strong responses from StarCraft II fans. We chose to do things that made us happy and hoped that you’d like those things too. As it turns out, you did. Enough that we felt that just one TSL tournament in 2020 wasn’t going to cut it.

What better way to continue our unique take on StarCraft II tournaments than to host another one during the wonderful winter season? The broadcast will feature presents, competitions, surprise guests, and plenty of holiday spirit. And of course we’ll have prize money and EPT points for the players.

TSL5 was a learning experience for us. We made plenty of mistakes. Most were fixed before you, the fans, could notice, but some slipped through the cracks. We made some decisions that weren’t bad, per se, but we should have been striving for great. So we’re going to change things. Some of these changes will jump off the screen and some you might not notice at all—just trust us when we say we’ve taken a long, hard look in the mirror, and we hope we can take TSL6 to another level.

So what are the major changes? We’ll start off with the length of the tournament. TSL5 was played out over four weekends. This, combined with the amount of matches being played, meant that the last two days of play were much shorter than the previous weekends. We saw a number of viewers coming into the Twitch chat just as the tournament ended, surprised that it was over. That’s why we’ve decided to condense the schedule and make the final two days a bit longer.

The qualifiers were also given a slight overhaul. Our biggest mistake during the qualifying phase of TSL5 was allowing NA and EU qualifiers to be played out on the same day. We made a post apologizing for that but it was, at that point, too late to fix. We also had a problem with Korean players not liking the double elimination format of the qualifiers and we will therefore change that to a single elimination bracket. We’ll release a post early next week with more detailed information.

The qualifiers will start at an earlier, regional, time than TSL5 and will be played out in a single day. The StarCraft II tournament schedule is very tight at this time of year, which is why we will be running all qualifiers in a single week.

In general, the rules will stay the same. Players wishing to compete in the Korean qualifiers must either be a) a Korean citizen, or b) living in Korea. Korean citizens are generally not allowed to play in the NA/EU qualifiers and anyone living in Korea gets to choose: KR or NA/EU, exclusively. The one major change is that all qualifiers will have a default server and the only way to change servers is if both players agree. Tournament admins will have no say in server decisions.

Next up is daily start time. For TSL5 we started each day at 2PM CET. That was great for European viewers, but not so great for fans in North America—especially if you’re on the west coast. For TSL6 every play day will start at 5PM CET / 11AM EST / 8 AM PST. We understand that will make the tournament run very late for our Korean players but we have not been given any indications that that is an issue, and we’ll try to schedule their matches as early in the day as possible.

Now, about the format. We’re expanding the amount of players we’ll have in TSL6, from 24 to 32. They will be placed in a 32-player “double elimination” bracket, seeded according to EPT points at the start of the tournament. However, there’s a reason we placed “double elimination” in quotation marks. All games in the round of 32 will be elimination games. That’s right, players losing their series on day 1 or day 2 of the tournament are eliminated. If you make it through these “play-in” games, you get that extra life a normal double elimination style tournament awards you. If you want a visual representation of the bracket, Liquipedia has prepared an example bracket for you.

TSL5 had an issue where the first round matches weren’t particularly meaningful, with wins not conferring much of an advantage. We felt that this new, modified, double elimination format was the best way to make sure every match felt meaningful and exciting, maintain the competitive integrity of the tournament, and also address some practical concerns of the tournament (scheduling, broadcast hours, etc).

We are also happy to announce that we'll have the same title sponsor for TSL6. The love for StarCraft runs deep in the halls of Shopify and they've become so much more than a partner for us. We'll introduce them better in a separate post, closer to the start of the tournament, but here's what Shopify had to say about partnering with us for another TSL.

That’s it for now. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll have plenty of more announcements for you such as casters, guests, broadcast partners (this one will take you back), partners, competitions, and more. Thanks for making TSL5 great and we look forward to seeing you in chat for TSL6!