The road to the Blizzard World Championship 2012 has begun in earnest. Detailed schedules for national qualifiers and finals have started to be released by Blizzard, with Australia, Brazil, Italy, and Poland among the countries now open for sign-ups. In the case of Italy, the National Championship has already been confirmed for May 1st, at Napoli Gamecon. Make sure to check your country's section to see if there's a qualifier that interests you, as a viewer or participant!With the qualification process started in earnest, Ilja Rotelli, Blizzard's Global Director of Community & eSports, gave TeamLiquid a quick Q&A session about some of the details in nationals stage of the 2012 World Championship.

For the recent MLG Spring Arena open qualifiers, Blizzard was directly involved in sending out invites to the top players on the regional ladders. Is there any way the ladder might be more involved in the qualification process, or is that mostly up to the partner organizations?

Ilja Rotelli

Yes. We’re actually planning to use the ladder for a number of slots in several Nationals. Stay tuned for more details.

With some of the national qualifiers being run through online events, will there be any improvements to Battle.net to allow large tournaments to be run more easily? (Whether it's similar to Warcraft 3's automated tournament system or other methods).

Ilja Rotelli

We’re obviously always looking into this kind of functionality, but we don’t have specific plans to announce right now.

With building more 'participatory esports' being a goal, have you suggested more open qualification processes to your partner organizations, opposed to the heavily seeded and invite based systems that are common at present?

Ilja Rotelli

The short answer is, yes. The eSports infrastructure we want to build for the World Championship Series needs to be transparent and easy to understand. While the invitational format works well for the eSports industry, when it comes down to representing one’s country in a true world championship everyone deserves a transparent path to the title. It might take more than a year to have a fully open road to the title, but that’s exactly where we’re going and we’ll get there.

What kind of criteria was used in deciding which countries would host national qualifiers?

Ilja Rotelli

We looked at the size of the active StarCraft II playing population. We adjusted the number of slots up slightly at the continental championship level when a country has a recognizable professional scene, but otherwise it’s just a measure of activity.

What kind of system will be used in awarding the spots to national championships? A system where a fixed number of top placing players receive spots? Or a point based system where people accrue points over multiple events?

Ilja Rotelli

We offer a combination of qualifier invitations and ladder invitations. The qualifier invitations work like you described: we’ll select some of the more fitting competitions and leagues and award the top players that emerge from those with qualification slots. The remaining slots will go to top ladder players from every nation. We don’t have any plans to use a point system this year, but we have considered it as an option for the future.

At each phase, how many representatives will each country and continent be given? Will it be weighted based on StarCraft II playing population and other considerations, or will they be equal like last year's invitational?

Ilja Rotelli

The number of representatives from each country or region will be weighted at each level based on the StarCraft II player population, with some additional weighting offered to regions that have an official pro scene.

You mentioned that National Championship spots will be added to existing events. Most existing events pit players against international competition, so does this mean players will be able to qualify for their country's National Championship from a tournament where they played players of other nationalities? (For example, Koreans qualifying for Korea by beating Europeans at an IEM event)

Ilja Rotelli

Yes, there will be cases where National Qualifier events will involve players competing against players of other nationalities. We’ll look at the top finishers who are of the appropriate citizenship (including those with appropriate Visas) for that region as a part of that qualification. So, for example, players from many nationalities participate in MLG events -- we will be offering MLG qualifier spots for the US National, so they would only qualify the top-ranked MLG player(s) with valid United States citizenship. In the future, we will look at adjusting the system with independent qualifiers and/or a point system where players could qualify from international tournaments.

Is there a ballpark number of national qualifier events you are aiming for? Do you plan to use a few, centralized events, or do you plan to spread it out over as many events as possible?

Ilja Rotelli

This year, we plan to use a few centralized events from established StarCraft II organizers. In the future, we hope to spread the qualifiers among a larger number of events.

Will there be certain rules or standards Blizzard seeks to enforce at the national qualifier level in order to maintain consistency with the later rounds? (Map pool, etc).

Ilja Rotelli

The rules in for the 2012 events will be provided by Blizzard, for consistency, across National and Continental Finals. Given the way we want to reward players who are participating in existing leagues, we can’t enforce the same set of rules below Nationals level.

While Blizzard plans to partner with major organizations to hold and broadcast the various stages of qualifiers, many esports organizations have moved to partial (for HD quality) or full pay-per-view models. With Blizzard be requiring a certain level of free quality video availability in order to cooperate in the Battle.net World Championship process?

Ilja Rotelli

All major Battle.net World Championship events will have a free stream available for the community to watch, with a minimum quality level of 480p. In some cases, higher quality free streams will be available. Depending on the event, the highest quality stream may be offered as a premium service, but no event will be exclusive to premium viewers. Note that, while most Nationals will be streamed, a few of the smaller countries may only be able to provide replays or VODs. We didn’t want to cut out smaller countries from the competition just because they weren’t able to get an international stream running. In either case, more information on each event will be on the StarCraft II website.