The majority of pro-players rely heavily on placement in tournaments and results for their living to continue as pro-gamers. The tournaments are well organized and someone new to the game may be a little confused on understanding how players get to blizzcon.
Let me explain it for the person who wants to understand it. First, to understand a key point, there is a difference between a team and individual event. Team events are not part of the indivdual scoring system. There is a professional team league with weekly team events that is hosted by Kespa called Proleague. In it you have regular competition between teams. Most people who watch starcraft regularly cheer for one of these teams or some of the few non-kespa teams such as My Insanity, liquid, Root, Millenium, Yoe Flash Wolves, Hong Kong Attitude, Invasion, Property, Flipside 3, etc. Blizzcon is more like an all star game of the teams, its an individual event. Anything that happened during team events or unscored tournaments do not help players go to Blizzcon. Some might have believed that so let me explain how players are scored for Blizzcon.
Road to Blizzcon- Blizzcon, WCS Premier, WCS challenger, and Non-WCS Events.
Overview-
The tournament scene finale happens annually at blizzcon. The tournament scene occurs from january until blizzcon, with a brief break over the holiday season. This finale is the global standings to a series of regional tournaments that are tiered in 5 scoring tiers which are WCS premier, WCS challenger, and 3 tiers of non wcs events. The tiers are selected in advance, and mostly depend on the available player pool of the tournament.
Scoring of the events-
A player is scored at each event with the wcs system starts with 64 players down to a winner over 3 seasons.
Two of the wcs leagues are sponsored in South Korea under 2 major esports organizations Kespa and GomEXP. The non-Korean wcs events are hosted by ESL TV. The client replays of WCS majors are all publicly available online. Most of the replays are found in the respective links to the youtube channels.
For the interested reader, the scoring is as follows for these events.
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- Rank 1 2000 points
- Rank 2 1250 points
- Ranks 3-4 900 points
- Ranks 5-8 600 points
- Ranks 9-12 400 points
- Ranks 13-16 300 points
- Ranks 17-24 150 points
- Ranks 25-32 100 points/50 points in GSL
- Ranks 33-64 50 points
The non-WCS events were hosted by other promient sponsors and the links for them I will not provide here, but are included in the final tally.
The sponsors for 2015 with their tiers were
- IEM Tiers 1 and 2
- GomEXP Tier 2
- Gfinity Tier 3
- Copenhagen Games Tier 3
- Kespa Tier 2
- Dreamhack Tier 2
- Hong Kong Esports limited Tier 3
- Asus Rog Gamers Tier 3
- 4 Star Gamers Tier 3
- MSI Masters Tier 2
The culmination of these points is highly detailed and results in the final tally ,which gives the Official Blizzcon Rankings The current predictions of the players qualifiying for blizzcon are updated daily.
Unscored events
Most of the unscored events have reasons for not being scored. For example many tournaments this year were not in Heart of the Swarm but were in LOTV such as the redbull archon tournament, lycan League, Desrow weekly, Legacy of the ultras, Olimoleague, etc. Another reason the events are not scored is because they are online events, such as the leifang cup, ASL, Go4sc2, etc. A final reason is that the events are privately hosted, poor player pool, invite only, or setup after a certain time, such as Homestory cup, HIAT, Destiny I, or some redbull events. These tournaments may have even produced some of the best games, but are not considered for scoring.
Interpreting Results-
There are 16 players who have made blizzcon they are-
- Hero
- Innovation
- Maru
- Parting
- Life
- Rain
- Hydra
- Byul
- Classic
- Dream
- Polt
- Zest
- Lilbow
- Sos
- Rogue
- Fantasy/Hyun
Blizzcon attendees is not completely decided at the moment, and a nice article has been written about the current standings and possible placements. Players losing at a tournaments does not mean that they are not the best player at the moment, or were not the best player of the year, but it does often mean that they out strategized, were nervous at the event, were tired from the events leading up to it, or other reasons. Players often study about other pros using Aligulac, ladder replays, and replays from events.
What to expect from blizzcon? The players have to prepare for all the players at the event in advance and have been playing hard all season. Due to limited preparation not every series will be so even. Last year for example, MMA prepared for a single matchup only to lose in the finals in another matchup he did not prepare for. This doesn't mean exceptional games in nearly the whole tournament and you should watch as much as possible. To win Blizzcon is exceptional and it takes nothing away from the winner to say that all of the people who go have the capacity to win.
You might be new and have a difficulty seeing and understanding what to see. I want to make a few suggestions to help in your early viewing experiences. Identify who is typically the aggressor and who is the defender. Use this to determine what type of strategies that the player uses. If the game ends decisively, usually the mistake is in information control. Players make the wrong units, at the wrong times, at the wrong places. Also, pay attention to an individual player that you like and watch how they change between games. Did a player play defensive one series and aggressive the next? Did they do the same builds each game or mix it up? Usually doing the same builds means that they are confident in their skills, and mixing things up means they want to disturb the opponents styles a bit. Individual information about the aspects of the game or terms used have been summarized extensively in the largest guide assembled. Lastly, enjoy the event for what it is, the last Heart of the Swarm tournament that you will likely see.
Starcraft 2 Heart of the Swarm has progressed for 5 years leading up to this moment. Its the end of a great era in the Heart of the Swarm. Get hyped! Enjoy everything you can about it!!