The second big WCS tournament of the year is in the books and despite a lousy start time for NA/SA viewers (along with technical problems the first two days--especially day two), it was an excellent event. It was a great idea to split Artosis and Tasteless up during most of the event--the casting was excellent. For the third time this year the all-foreigner final was a PvZ (albeit with entirely different participants each time--all six were Europeans); just like the first two occasions the Protoss won (although it took seven games this time). This is the first tournament where all three eligible Koreans participated but none made the final (Polt came the closest losing in the semi-finals to Nerchio; Hydra was knocked out early by Neeb and viOLet later by ShoWTimE).
While watching I tried to note particularly exciting/weird/interesting games, so here they are (all the VODs are on DreamHack's Youtube channel): Cham vs Bly game 2; Strange vs Polt game 5 (the draw); Has vs Happy games 3/4; HuK vs iaguz game 3; Harstem vs Jim game 1; JimRising vs viOLet game 2; Scarlett vs FireCake games 2/4; Guru vs Snute games 1/3; Nerchio vs VortiX games 2/3; Scarlett vs Nerchio games 2/3; Cham vs Jim game 1; Neeb vs Hydra games 1-3; Neeb vs Nerchio games 4/5; MaSa vs ShoWTimE games 1/2; Nerchio vs Polt games 1/3; and Nerchio vs ShoWTimE games 2-3/6
There were a lot of notable performances for varying reasons--Has playing macro games, Cham making a surprise run, MaSa making his second straight semi-final, both PtitDrogo and Harstem knocked out in the first round (the former admitting confidence problems), Nerchio ploughing through the tough side of the bracket to just miss out on his first championship since DreamHack Bucharest back in 2012, Strange beating Polt but not understanding draw conditions, etc. Several players landed their biggest winnings to date: the aforementioned ShoWTimE, Nerchio, MaSa, and Cham along with Guru and Strange.
In terms of predictions Aligulac was one better than I was (finishing 23-10, or 69%, neither of us getting the winner right), which is roughly the average for the site throughout 2015 (suggesting some of the randomness of early LOTV has disappeared). As for viewership (I wish Fuzic would add the numbers from rebroadcasts that occur the same day): Day One 24.5k, Day Two 26.5k, and Day Three 28.5k. Here's a look at all the WCS majors so far:
The Shanghai numbers don't include the massive Chinese audience. Assuming the event occurs at decent times for Europeans it looks as though tournaments are settling in at the 25k-30k range. These numbers are lower than WCS last year (although slightly better to on par with 2014), but the way the system is arranged it's not a very good comparison--it makes more sense to compare DreamHacks to DreamHacks, so here are the 2015-2016 numbers (because of the limitations of the graph program I use I had cut out one so picked the lowest, DH Valencia--you can see it here):
The final day numbers from Tours are the same as 2015, although the days before are higher; the tournament also (as expected) had better numbers than Austin because of it's Euro-friendly schedule; on the whole about the same performance as Leipzig--with the buzz from LOTVs release gone, the fanbase is holding strong (the simplest way to affirm that: highest day one numbers are from WCS Spring, highest day two from Leipzig, and highest final from ROCCAT--it's a wide spread).
In other news since my last post, TotalBiscuit has announced more SC2 content after a six month absence. It's going to be monthly tournament, although the specifics have not yet been announced (if there are invites I'd assume some of his old Axiom players would be included, or perhaps CranK would be part of the casting team). He also intends to stream SC2 from time-to-time (whether he'll go back to Terran or continue with Protoss remains to be seen). An interesting comment he made is that he believes SC2 is in the best state that it's ever been in (in terms of balance and entertainment).
Jakatak posted a video talking about the ladder awhile ago--all the problems he discusses have been talked about before, but it's worth checking out--his idea of daily quests/rewards is a good one (as are the much discussed tiers within leagues).
Both Tefel and Sen retired recently--the latter having no significant results in LOTV, while the Polish Zerg hasn't gone far in a tournament in two years.
A final note: Fuzic is back up to its usual working order. I wish the search function on the site was intelligent, but c'est la vie.
This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)
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