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WCA's press conference included World Cyber Games winner Xiaofeng "Sky" Li (2nd from right) WCA's press conference included World Cyber Games winner Xiaofeng "Sky" Li (2nd from right)

WCA Yinchuan Grand Finals

joinDOTA was fortunate enough to have a representative fly from joinDOTA HQ in Berlin to Beijing to take part in the press conference on Saturday afternoon to hear what the organisers had to say about the WCA's plans for 2015.WCA 2014 had the largest prize pool of any event outside of TI, with a total of $470,000 in prize money ( Newbee 's win earned them $325,000 ) and the event overall featured 9 titles.Last year's event was not without its problems though. The 100 minute tie between Alliance and Cloud9 is probably one of the most well-known, however, General Operation Manager John Liu spoke of past mistakes and spoke adamantly that "this time we have more qualified people to assure a greater eSports experience".So what are WCA plans for 2015? Well in terms of game titles Dota 2 returns alongside Hearthstone, CrossFire, Warcraft3 and World of Tanks. One new addition to the list of games is League of Legends, which perhaps unbeknown to the average Dota 2 fan, is extremely popular in China.However, Dota 2 fans will be perhaps happy to know that League of Legends will not feature in the organiser's European event to be held at GamesCom, with the WCA deciding to go with Dota 2, HearthStone, Heroes of the Storm and Warcraft3 instead.WCA's plan for 2015 will also include an Xbox One exclusive, and the prize pool for the whole year across all events will be 96,000,000 RMB, just over $15 million dollars.The pinnacle of the WCA in 2015 will be thefrom the 11th-14th December, with the prize pool for the PC games at the event 32 million RMB ($5 million). In order to qualify for WCA Yinchuan, several qualifiers will be organised both online and offline (for SEA, China, EU and NA) which will take place between April to June.Half of the player base will come from the WCA Open qualifiers, which will be regional and part of Gamescom 2015. The WCA will also have a booth at E3, although no plans were announced for an actual event in NA as of yet. Furthermore, college pre-qualifiers will be run in China, which start in May and will be part of a College League with a 6 million RMB ($960,000) prize pool.Regional offline qualifiers are not uncommon in Starcraft2 or other titles, and have been hosted by the ESL for their Intel Extreme Masters for quite a long time. Regional offline qualifiers allow teams to compete in LANs closer to home in order to qualify for a global finals elsewhere. For an EU regional GamesCom is quite a fitting location as it is also where Dota 2 made its debut back in August 2011 with the first International. WCA were honest about their shortcomings in 2014, but the plans for 2015 look solid, and we may well be looking at another major annual event to add to our calendars.