StarCraft II World Championship Series

StarCraft II World Championship Series

File:StarCraft II World Championship Series logo.jpg
Sport	StarCraft II
Founded	2012
Owner(s)	Blizzard Entertainment
Most recent champion(s)	Joona Sotala
Most titles	Kim "sOs" Yoo-jin (2)
TV partner(s)	Twitch
Related competitions	Global StarCraft II League Dreamhack Intel Extreme Masters
Official website	wcs.starcraft2.com/en-us/

The StarCraft II World Championship Series (WCS) is a StarCraft II professional tournament series organized and sanctioned by Blizzard Entertainment. It combines the highest levels of professional StarCraft II competition. Its current iteration features two regions, World Championship Series Korea and World Championship Series Circuit with World Championship Series Global events featuring players from both regions. The grand finals are held annually at BlizzCon in Anaheim, California, except for the first year of competition, when the finals were held in Shanghai, China. WCS Circuit events are streamed on Twitch while WCS Korea events are available on Twitch, YouTube, and afreecaTV.

World Championship Series Korea professional competition is centered around events organized by afreecaTV under the Global StarCraft II League (GSL) name, including GSL Code S seasons and GSL Super Tournament events. World Championship Series Circuit professional competition centers around tournaments held under the World Championship Series Circuit name with qualifiers held for each under the World Championship Series Challenger name.

World Championship Global competition centers around two events. These are ESL's Intel Extreme Masters World Championship event in Katowice, Poland and afreecaTV's GSL vs. the World event in Seoul, Korea. Starting 2018, the former has had its prize pool crowdfunded through the StarCraft II War Chest system, as has the Global Finals event since 2017, which allows players to purchase cosmetic items in game with 25% of sales going towards funding the professional scene.

History

Founding

The StarCraft II World Championship Series was founded alongside a move to share branding among Blizzard Entertainment's competitive games and tournaments under the name Battle.net World Championship Series, which also included World of Warcraft competition. The first year of competition, the 2012 StarCraft II World Championship Series, featured over 30 events including national and continental championships that fed into the grand finals of the year held in Shanghai, China alongside the World of Warcraft finals. Events were limited to a few days or weeks of play with nationality-based limitations. This format lead to the series of events being well-viewed but not considered the peak of StarCraft II competition, especially all events that featured no Koreans and strict nationality requirements for players of the respective nationality or continent.

The shared branding initiative ended as starting with 2013, the respective games' events no longer culminated in the Battle.net World Championship and instead ended under separate names as more Blizzard games came to have their own professional circuits run by the company.

Transition to league format

Coinciding with the release of StarCraft II's first expansion pack, Heart of the Swarm, the World Championship Series' format was changed drastically to center around Blizzard-run events, turning it into the highest level of professional StarCraft II competition. Starting with the 2013 season, the WCS transitioned to a GSL-inspired league format where seasons would run over multiple weeks and months. These leagues were played under the name WCS Premier League with the lower tier of competition named WCS Challenger, analogous to the GSL's Code S and Code A respectively. Korean StarCraft II leagues upon which this new format was based were included in this transition and came under the WCS banner, with WCS points being given out alongside prize money to define who would qualify for the Global Finals. Nationality requirements were removed for the first year of the new league format and though reintroduced in 2014, region-locking remained minimal. This lead to Korean players, historically dominant in professional competition for both the original StarCraft and StarCraft II, winning all leagues across all regions for both years of open league play. 2013's WCS featured cross-league seasonal finals, while those were removed for the 2014 season.

Both of Korea's individual leagues, Ongamenet's Ongamenet Starleague (OSL) and GOMTV's Global StarCraft II League (GSL), were included in this new WCS format in 2013. The leagues alternated, with the first and last seasons of WCS 2013 in Korea being GSL events, and the second being an OSL event. In 2014, all Korean leagues were GSL events as the OSL had officially ceased operations.

Region-locking and end of non-Korean leagues

In 2015, non-Korean leagues were consolidated into one, the WCS Premier League, while the Korean region saw the introduction of a new Korean league to run alongside the GSL, the StarCraft II StarLeague (SSL) organized by SPOTV. For the first time since the transition to a league format, harsh region-locking restrictions were introduced which lead to the first non-Korean WCS Premier League champion, though some Korean players managed to continue competing by moving to the United States and participating under the new residency requirements.

In 2016, coinciding with the release of StarCraft II's second expansion, Legacy of the Void, the format of the WCS was once again vastly changed. After 2015's consolidation, the WCS Premier League was completely phased out in favor of regional qualifiers and large weekend tournaments. The regional qualifiers took up the name of the lower flight of Premier League competition, and became WCS Challenger. Starting in 2016, Korean and non-Korean WCS rankings were separated, with the newly created WCS Korea and WCS Circuit rankings each constituting half of the seeds into the year's Global Finals.

Standardized format

In late 2016 after the 2016 Global Finals, for the first time since the start of the World Championship Series, Blizzard Entertainment announced a standard format that would remain unchanged for both 2017 and 2018, as all previous event years had featured large changes each year. There would now be three seasons of Korea's GSL Code S, joined by shorter week-long GSL Super Tournaments for WCS Korea, and four weekend events for WCS Circuit, with regional Challenger qualifiers held for six regions. Two official WCS Global tournaments would be held, IEM Katowice and GSL vs. the World. While other events could be included in the WCS if they covered given requirements, this was the official lineup of events for both 2017 and 2018.

Also starting in 2017, crowdfunding was introduced in the form of a War Chest system that allowed players to purchase cosmetic items in-game with 25% of revenue from purchases going to increasing the prize pool of a given event to a point, beyond which money would go to funding competitive play in general. The first event to have its prize pool increased was the 2017 WCS Global Finals, which received $200,000, the targeted amount, within the first of three stages of the crowdfunding. Since then, it has been used to crowdfund $150,000 for 2018's IEM Season XII - World Championship 2018 and, most recently, $200,000 for the 2018 WCS Global Finals.

Results

Year	Winner	Score	Runner-up
2012 Details	Won "PartinG" Lee-sak South Korea	4–2	Creator South Korea
2013 Details	Kim "sOs" Yoo-jin South Korea	4–1	Lee "Jaedong" Jae-dong South Korea
2014 Details	Lee "Life" Seung Hyun South Korea	4–1	Mun "MMA" Seong Won South Korea
2015 Details	Kim "sOs" Yoo-jin South Korea	4–3	Lee "Life" Seung Hyun South Korea
2016 Details	Byun "ByuN" Hyun Woo South Korea	4–2	Park "Dark" Ryung Woo South Korea
2017 Details	Lee "Rogue" Byung Ryul South Korea	4–2	Eo "soO" Yoon Su South Korea
2018 Details	Joona Sotala Finland	4–2	Kim "Stats" Dae Yeob South Korea