Great news for WCS as at the ladder will now impact qualifying (along with some money). Here's the breakdown:
1st place - US$1,400 & direct qualification to the WCS
Circuit Winter Championship
2nd place - US$1,200 & direct qualification to the WCS
Circuit Winter Championship
3rd-4th place - US$800
5th-8th place - US$600
9th-16th place - US$400
The ranks are going to matter through February 12th and it's going to be interesting to see how it impacts the quality of ladder. Nathanias raised some interesting concerns (the way your server choice impacts who you play), although I think as long as issues like this are being looked into I can live with a flawed beginning. I also wonder how (if) this will impact FearDragon's NA Ladder Heroes (at the moment it looks like Ravi will shut it down, which would make sense unless he changes how it functions).
I caught the final of the latest ESL Americas Open (52) which featured a great seven game slugfest between PiLiPiLi and Excel (aka a million other alias').
Life has been arrested for match-fixing, which strikes me as bizarre for a player who has earned close to half a million US over his career. An arrest isn't a conviction and it will be interesting to follow the case and see how it unfolds.
BaseTrade announced they were adding Oliomoley and FearDragon to their team, but I have no idea what that means in terms of content. At the moment it looks like it means the latter two will now have the former's branding (something largely moot for the OlimoLeague). I've seen some people Tweet out that this is great for the NA scene, but I'm not sure in what way (I've been disappointed with BaseTrade's NA material for quite some time--the Corsair NA tourney is a good example--does anyone care if Hydra wins an NA event?). If this injects money into Ravi's projects (whatever those might be without Ladder Heroes), then more power to them.
I'm not sure what (if anything) needs to be said about last weeks Unfiltered drama (which spilled over into The Late Game). The summation is simple: Thorin and Paul Chaloner dislike the WCS changes, but there arguments are incredibly flawed (it was bizarre was Paul acknowledged the flaws with Destiny, but then continued to repeat them):
1 - foreigners should only achieve success/money against the best Koreans, but Koreans who can't beat the best in their own region shouldn't have the same standard applied and be given access to foreign tournaments because...well no reason is actually given, but the implication seems to be they deserve it more
2 - best-on-best is what everyone wants to see in SC2...even if 99% of tournaments outside Korea don't come close to approaching that. The tournament formulas they love (IEMs, DreamHacks, MLGs, etc) never actually featured best-on-best (as the laundry list of unremarkable Koreans who have won such tournaments illustrates), which makes their point very hard to follow
3 - Thorin specifically believes foreign players are well-paid in SC2 (something TotalBiscuit has unfortunately echoed), something which hasn't been the case for years and there's no reason for him (or TB) not to be aware of it. I have no idea why these otherwise very savvy gentlemen are unable to see the flaws in their own arguments, or see that the status quo they support has failed. Thorin clearly just hasn't paid attention to the scene for years, while TB is understandably (and publicly) bitter about what happened to Axiom. Does any of this matter? I don't think so. Neither Thorin or ReDeYe are relevant to the SC2 scene.
This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)
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