The 2018 StarCraft II World Championship Series (WCS) is the 2018 edition of the

StarCraft II World Championship Series The ''StarCraft II'' World Championship Series (WCS) was a ''StarCraft II'' professional tournament series organized and sanctioned by Blizzard Entertainment that ran from 2012 to 2019. For all but its first year of operation, it was the highest ...

, the top

esports Esports, short for electronic sports, is a form of competition using video games. Esports often takes the form of organized, multiplayer video game competitions, particularly between professional players, individually or as teams. Although orga ...

tournament circuit for

StarCraft II ''StarCraft II'' is a military science fiction video game created by Blizzard Entertainment as a sequel to the successful ''StarCraft'' video game released in 1998. Set in a fictional future, the game centers on a galactic struggle for dominance a ...

. Featuring the top eight players from each WCS region, ''World Championship Series Korea'' and the ''World Championship Series Circuit'', the Global Finals received greater coverage than most prior events when Finnish professional player Joona "Serral" Sotala became the first non-

Korean Korean may refer to: People and culture * Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula * Korean cuisine * Korean culture * Korean language **Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl **Korean dialects and the Jeju language ** ...

world champion in the StarCraft series.

Format

The 2018 StarCraft II World Championship Series was separated into two regions, WCS Circuit and WCS Korea. The former featured four large events with accompanying qualifiers under the WCS Challenger branding, while the latter featured three seasons of the long-running

Global StarCraft II League Global StarCraft II League (GSL) is a '' StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void'' tournament hosted by afreecaTV and Blizzard Entertainment in South Korea. This event is broadcast up to 2 nights a week. GOMeXp (formerly GOMTV) had hosted it until the ...

(GSL) Code S with two smaller GSL Super Tournament events interspersed. Two shared ''World Championship Series Global'' events featured players from both regions prior to the Global Finals. All these events gave out WCS Circuit and/or WCS Korea points that determined the seeding of the Global Finals. Following the introduction of the War Chest for the 2017 Global Finals, two events received War Chest crowdfunding in 2018, with $150,000 and $200,000 added to the prize pools of IEM Katowice and the WCS Global Finals, respectively.

Seeding

Eight players from each WCS region qualify to the event based on their WCS Points-based rankings. Winners of WCS Circuit stops, GSL Code S events, and IEM Katowice receive automatic qualification. The sixteen players are then seeded into four four-player groups for the first round based on their region-specific ranking. A draw is held for the quarterfinals bracket, with winners of each group facing second-place finishers of other groups.

Results

For the first time in StarCraft II competition, both regions had all of their large events won by a single person. For WCS Circuit this was Joona "Serral" Sotala, who won all four stops and all related European Challenger events. For WCS Korea this was Cho "Maru" Seong Ju, who won all three GSL Code S seasons. WCS Global event IEM Katowice was won by the previous year's WCS champion, Lee "Rogue" Byung Ryul, with the other WCS Global event, GSL vs. the World, going to Joona "Serral" Sotala, marking the first non-Korean

champion.

Global Finals

The WCS Global Finals were held at the

Anaheim Convention Center The Anaheim Convention Center is a major convention center in Anaheim, California and is the largest exhibition facility on the West Coast of the United States. It is located across from the Disneyland Resort on Katella Avenue. The original comp ...

Anaheim Anaheim ( ) is a city in northern Orange County, California, part of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. As of the 2020 United States Census, the city had a population of 346,824, making it the most populous city in Orange County, the 10th-most p ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

as part of

BlizzCon 2018 BlizzCon is an annual gaming convention held by Blizzard Entertainment to promote its major franchises including ''Warcraft'', '' StarCraft'', '' Diablo'', '' Hearthstone'', ''Heroes of the Storm,'' and ''Overwatch''. The first BlizzCon was he ...

. They featured a group stage as the first round of play, played out the prior week as part of the BlizzCon Opening Week 2018, followed by bracket play from the quarterfinals onward at the convention center itself.

References

{{eSports StarCraft II World Championship Series

StarCraft ''StarCraft'' is a military science fiction media franchise created by Chris Metzen and James Phinney and owned by Blizzard Entertainment. The series, set in the beginning of the 26th century, centers on a galactic struggle for dominance am ...