Late last week, Blizzard announced further details about the 2015 Hearthstone World Championship. I recently commented about problems I saw with the qualification structure for the event, and wanted to share my thoughts on the new information we’ve been given.

First of all, I wanted to discuss the points awarded from tournaments. This was one of the key issues that I felt was flawed with the road to Worlds as it was first announced, and I still have my reservations. Players who receive invitations to tournaments that award points have a vastly higher chance of qualifying than players who do not, simply because they have a much larger potential pool of points they can earn.

That said, the details of the tournament requirements in the announcement did stipulate that at least half of the Top 16 players in any point-awarding event must be drawn from open qualifiers. That helps level the playing field at least somewhat, since while invited players still have a major advantage, it’s not an insurmountable one. The events will still inordinately reward those invited players, since they will have to win far fewer rounds to actually earn points, but at least the events will be more accessible to competitive players outside the established pros than they have been in the past.

The specific point payouts seem quite high to me. I definitely understand wanting to reward the winners of high-profile events with a lot of points, since it helps in star-building and developing storylines throughout the year. That said, the large point payouts will make it extremely difficult for players who only earn points from ranked ladder to compete. Winning a 10K event is worth as many points as finishing 1st in a season, while first place in a 25K event is worth twice as much! In a sixteen player 25K event, winning a single elimination round earns you as many points as finishing in the Top 50 on the ranked ladder. That’s a huge advantage over players who don’t receive tournament invites.

It’s not clear as of yet just how many of these events will happen during the qualification period, but if there is any reasonably large number, I’ll be shocked to see anyone make it into the top point earner spots that receives a seed for the regional qualifiers who doesn’t earn a large chunk of those points from tournaments. On the one hand, that will mean that the seeded players will be proven competitors that fans know, which is a good thing. But on the other hand, it means that it will be that much harder for unknown players to break through and make a name for themselves.

One thing I was definitely happy to see in the tournament details, though, was a requirement for timely announcements and advertising of event details. Last year, Blizzard was not the best at communicating information about tournaments leading up to BlizzCon, which was very frustrating for me personally. Last year’s Last Call tournament wasn’t announced until mere days before the event. After I cancelled a trip to play in it, it was later announced that regional qualifier would have a LAN stage in New York during a time when I was going to be unavailable due to a Magic Pro Tour. Proper communication and announcements ahead of time would have saved me a lot of frustration, and I hope to see Blizzard and the organizations they work with for these events do a better job of it in the future.

The other big part of the announcement that caught my attention was the format for the qualifiers and championship. Rather than the Last Hero Standing format, for which I have expressed my displeasure at length in the past, this year’s events will be using the new “Conquest” format. Where Last Hero Standing required you to defeat each of your opponent’s decks, Conquest requires you to win with each of your own decks in order to win the match.

The implications of this change are pretty huge, and I think quite positive. As I expressed in my recent discussion of tournament formats, I feel Last Hero Standing fails some pretty key tests of what makes a good tournament format. Because after the first game of a match you’re always picking your deck with full knowledge of what your opponent is playing, Last Hero Standing generally resulted in lots of “counter” matchups, highly polarized games that weren’t especially interesting for the audience. Removing this dynamic should hopefully lead to more interesting games for spectators.

Because each new game is closer to blind pick, the decks played in Conquest tournaments should be more similar to those used on ladder. There will still be strategic elements for players in choosing which decks to play when in order to attempt to line up good matchups, but the nature of the format will lead to players bringing fewer highly polarized decks because they can’t know for certain which of their opponents’ decks they will face. This will make the winning decks from events much more relevant to fans, who can more easily adopt the lists themselves to play on ladder.

Perhaps my favorite part of the new format is that it does away with class bans. Bans were seen by many as a necessary evil of the Last Hero Standing format, since development imbalances could lead to a single deck running rampant and winning every match. Conquest solves this by only allowing any given deck to win once and then removing it from the match. That means that even the most overpowered individual deck can at most account for one win, making the perceived need for bans obsolete.

I’m not sure how I feel about the coverage implications of the new format, since requiring each player to win with all of their decks in every match seems like it could make developing storylines difficult. I’m not quite sure how to build a narrative around any particular match to differentiate it from another, since ultimately the results of each will be pretty much the same. That said, it at least means that every match is guaranteed to highlight a larger variety of different decks, because it’s now impossible for a player to sweep without changing decks. If a player has a particularly cool deck, like Tarei and his Miracle list from Worlds last year, we’re at least nearly guaranteed to see it, since it can’t be banned and is almost certain to be chosen by the player at some point even if they’re losing.

All told, I’m excited to see how Conquest plays out, and I hope to see many of the officially sanctioned point-granting events use the new format over the course of the year. And I hope to make my way into some of those events so I can start building up my points, especially since I missed out on the end of the January season thanks to a Magic tournament.

Speaking of Magic tournaments, I should probably get back to testing for the Pro Tour this weekend…I’ll be back to writing and streaming more next week!