One of the gaming highlights last year was Blizzard's World Championship Series in Sydney's Redfern, where hundreds of gamers turned out to watch Australia's best sixteen Starcraft 2 players fight it out for a chance to battle the world's best in Shanghai.

There won't be a repeat of the Australian or Oceanic WCS finals this year, after Blizzard, Starcraft 2's developer, opted to revamp the WCS format from a regional structure into three major regions encapsulating America, Europe and Korea.

While the new format has removed qualifiers for smaller gaming regions, such as Australia, the prize pool has been expanded to US$1.6 million across 13 events. Australians, and any other gamer for that matter, are able to play in any region.

Across three seasons, players earn points across a variety of partnered and non-partnered events, including tournaments run by Major League Gaming in the United States, the Global Starcraft 2 League in Korea and Dreamhack in Europe.

But the biggest advantage of the new format has been a massive increase in production and quantity of high-quality production, some of which can be seen below.

Of course, this means Australians are forced to play either with a terrible ping (Europe), play in the most difficult environment (against Koreans) or on the American server.

Despite the troubles, however, one Australian has managed to succeed despite all the odds, with Andrew "mOOnGlaDe" Pender so far reaching the quarter-finals of WCS America's first Premier League.

The Queenslander broke into the round of 16 group stage after a strong run in the online qualifiers, and a solid performance in the groups has earned him a flight to the United States. The winner of the first WCS season will walk away with US$20,000 and 1500 seeding points for the WCS finals at the end of this year.

The WCS America Premier League continues from 6pm Saturday EST, with the top five qualifying to the finals of the first WCS season. Pender only needs one win to make the finals, so tune in and cheer on one of Australia's most decorated gamers.

Alex Walker is the regular gaming columnist for ABC Tech + Games. You can follow him on Twitter at @thedippaeffect.