With so many leagues around the world, each with its own championship, it's impossible to say who is the world's best StarCraft player. It is a game without a clear champion. Blizzard aims to fix that with today's announcement of the Battle.net World Championship, an international competition that "will be the culmination of more than 30 eSports events run by Blizzard and tournament organizers." Together, these events will comprise the "StaCraft II World Championship Series".
Details are sparse at the moment, but the structure the World Championship Series follows is fairly simple. It divides the world into 5 regions (North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Oceania), each comprised of several countries. Those countries will have individual national championships, and will send the top finishers at those championships up to a Regional Finals. The Regional Champions will then move up to the StarCraft II Global Finals.
It looks like Blizzard may be planning on integrating other leagues into the SC2 World Championship Series, explaining that, "Partners and organizations will be awarded National Championship seeds to distribute as they see fit, whether it be through brand-new events and tournaments, or online and live events, or by simply adding the seeds to their existing prize pools."
Sundance DiGiovanni, CEO of Major League Gaming, hinted as much on a Reddit thread covering the announcement , "Wow!!! I wonder who the execution partners will be?" I think we may now hazard a guess as to one of them.
It's an exciting development. It raises the possibility that StarCraft II will finally have a credible, international champion. As great as all the various SC2 leagues are, "Season Champion" does not have quite the same import when there are multiple seasons every year, and the competitive field is somewhat fractured among different leagues. Hopefully, the SC2 World Championship Series will also provide an overarching framework that reduces the risk of league politics getting in the way of great competition.
