Why this $60K international tournament might end up totally underwhelming



Photo: Blizzard

The appeal for a more open Hearthstone competition is as old as Hearthstone competition itself. And rightfully so: the esports scene of the Blizzard phenomenon started as an old boy’s club where the same names rotated around the handful of tournaments, playing a game of virtual tag for the trophies. While it was fun to watch at the beginning, fans started to naturally get tired and bored. They didn’t want so many closed invitationals. They wanted to watch new stories and new people to follow and care about.

Gradually, the scene changed and nowadays the majority of Hearthstone tournaments feature an open or semi-open qualifier portion. While most of the seeds continue to go towards known names’ ways, it would be a lie to say that the situation hasn’t changed for the better compared to the earliest days. Yet there was still room for debate and many argued that the ratio between invites and open slots could still be improved, in favor of the latter. And while it’s a debate worth having, it’s kind of awkward when a $60,000 international tournament serves as the testing ground.

If you are completely out of the loop about the China vs Europe Season 2 coming in March, it’s not entirely your fault. The tournament was announced with much fanfare from the Chinese side and the NetEase CEO even offered a Ferrari as a prize should the champion be a local hero. The nation that ruled the $190,000 WCA tournament and almost conquered BlizzCon as well lined-up their best players, choosing the top performers from the $48,000 Gold Series grand finals, a tournament which itself had an extensive qualification process. Europe, on the other hand, was sloppy in picking up the excitement and chose a completely different approach to recruit its octet. A sequence of 1024-man, best-of-three single elimination brackets was lazily set-up and ESL started their search for Europe’s eight among the thousands of players who signed up.

Single elimination has no place in high-stakes Hearthstone.



Even though many would applaud ESL’s dedication to having completely open qualifiers, this decision, alongside their overall approach towards the process, might irreparably harm the exposure of the grand final event in the end. Unpromoted, the European qualifiers remained largely outside community’s attention, completely failing to engage the western audience and make it give a damn. The few known names who managed to survive the Bo3 matches and reach the later rounds tried spreading the word to their followers, but those were mostly words of critique, pointing out just how flawed the entire set up is. Following our reporting on the tournament, a lengthy discussion was formed on twitter.

Though the Hearthstone scene isn’t stranger to salty tweets after tournament eliminations, for once the ousted players were right to issue critique. There’s a good reason single elimination brackets are never used as the sole format of competition in anything that has more than a few hundred bucks for prize pool, even more so in Hearthstone. Card games are by nature volatile so they need a tournament set-up that mitigates that volatility, whether it’s “second chance” formats like double elimination or swiss or simply increasing the number of games one needs to win in a single match. Ultimately, single elimination is a format which doesn’t necessarily rewards the best and more often than not it favors the luck of the draw, and thus has no place in high-stakes Hearthstone.

A quick glimpse at the European team should be enough to convince you. With seven of the eight slots already filled, more than half of the roster have never played a televised match in their life or have even come close to one. The argument that most of Hearthstone’s events remain invites-only also doesn’t work because it’s not even true anymore as there have been plenty of opportunities for aspiring players to make their name. It’s possible that there are still diamonds in the rough but at this point I’m more inclined to believe that the line-up of Team Europe is more a product of lucky breaks rather than a true display of skill. I wouldn’t know for sure, though – nobody cared to make an official stream for the tournament.





Photo: NEL





It’s wrong to think that the clique of unproven players to represent Europe in Hangzhou only concerns the western audiences as I don’t imagine that the other side is happy about how things are turning up. China has been competing with the west in Hearthstone since 2013 and the rivalry has been growing with each passing face-off. What started with a $5,000 showmatch has since attended high-stakes stages such as WEC, WCA and even BlizzCon.

China deserved a worthy opposition and they're not getting it.



Most of those events China lost and CN vs EU Season 2 was their chance at a payback, to show the world they can consistently win at Hearthstone against which are considered to be the leading regions. One glimpse at the Chinese line-up is enough to understand how seriously they take this tournament. There’s TiddlerCelestial who more than $100,000 last year playing Hearthstone, finishing second at two of the largest tournaments of 2014. There’s two-times CN vs KR finalist MagicWind who was considered the best in his region before TiddlerCelestial’s rise. There’s the mix of veterans and young but already battle scarred players, who’ve all attended LAN events.

Instead of facing opponents of equal status, they will get four guys who’ve never played a televised Hearthstone match ever, one MTG veteran who has been struggling to juggle two games, one Brit who’s still looking for his break-out moment and a young Dutchman who’ll have to carry them all. While easy win is certainly better than losing, I don’t imagine beating a kid to take his matchbox car feels particularly fulfilling.

That’s not to say the tournament is completely unsalvageable. With Nihilum’s Thijs “ThijsNL” Molendijk winning the seventh qualifiers, Team Europe finally got its spearhead and so there’s a story to be followed in Hangzhou. Few would’ve woken up at strange hours to watch a rag-tag gang of players getting slaughtered by the Chinese but it will be different now that the people’s champion has been found. If another big name manages to conquer the final qualifier, this might actually become an intriguing event.





It's up to this guy to save the tournament



Invitation is not a dirty word.



Yet with all the underwhelming vibe around the tournament, there are important lessons to be extracted from all this still. First of all, 100% open tournaments with simplistic format of competition don’t work and given the nature of Hearthstone and the accessibility of its esports aspect, I don’t believe they’ll ever work, at least for high-stakes events. When five-digit prize purses are on the line, it’s OK to apply at least partial control to the player pool. Invitation is not a dirty word and as much as we like to chant about openness and fairness of competition, in the end we tune in to watch the players who we’ve followed for a while, and there’s nothing wrong with that. On the contrary – it’s the most natural thing a sports fan can do. Maybe Screenager or Entryfee or Skylink will someday become great champions. Maybe they’ll fight off the notion that they’re only here because they got lucky in a Bo3. Maybe they'll even win the whole thing and make me look like a fool for this articlebut in the afternoon of February 20th I can’t give less damn about them.

What’s more, events with such an international profile need a proper build-up and coherence between the parties involved and this is where ESL missed the mark. Granted, the team has the Legedary Series finals to prepare but not showing a single game on stream and producing an adequate lead-up to the main event leaves an aftertaste of a rushed production, not to mention it would’ve quenched the nation-wide thirst for competitive Hearthstone. Opening a bunch of brackets and running them with a let-it-be attitude unmindful of how unsuitable their format actually is feels lazy and makes me think you don’t care about what’s going to happen in Hangzhou. And if you don’t, why should I?



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