Yesterday, ClanBase and the Global Gaming League (GGL) announced a partnership in order "to take competitive online video gaming to the next level by combining their respective communities and talents".
Let's start off with an introduction of both;
Global Gaming League and the money
GGL has had two successful seasons of StarCraft leagues including one pre-season league. The GGL site is made by the web design company » 2Advanced.com who've also made the official homepage for Oakley Sunglasses, Pittsburg Penguins and several other top level companies. Even though GGL is offering one of the greatest prize sums ever offered in the non-Korean StarCraft scene ($4000 in a total prize sum for the last season) and even though hiring 2Advanced.com must have cost a fortune, GGL has failed to attract the community's attention in a way that such prizes and organization seemingly deserve. GGL has been critized by several top gamers for not operating close enough to the community and thinking that money will solve it all.GGL: Only 11 players above the 1000-limit in the ladder
Last season of GGL only had 11 players ranked above the 1000 ladder points line which indicates a very, very low number of participants in the ladder. This can be compared to PGTour who had a total of 2394 players above the 1000 ladder points line. And PGTour, as you might know, had their ladder open for only four weeks while GGL's seasons are "3-4 months long". 
Strafe, of Templars of Twilight, explained to SG why he personally didn't play GGL - "It was too much trouble!". Strafe says that the free wins were being abused and that he had five losses without knowing it. "the site was quite a mess as well, it took me quite a while to figure out where to sign up and how it worked." Since GGL does not have their own gateway which is popular for ladders these days, one is forced to agree with the opponent on a certain date, time and location for your match to play. Once both players have agreed, a match is created. If someone does not show up at the specified time a loss is reported. Furthermore, it was not only the ladder system that did not work, the time zones to play at were only beneficial to Northen American players and thus forcing the rest of the world to play in the middle of the night or in general at an uncomfortable time if they would be interested in participating. As a conclusion we can see that GGL has indeed had some problems in attracting the community's attention though it might not have been only because of bad marketing.
ClanBase and their SC-history
The fact that ClanBase claims to be "Europe’s leading competition organizer for online gamers" is in our aspect irrelevant since their efforts within the StarCraft community have clearly given us another image than the above statement. The most interesting feature at ClanBase today is their Nations Cup. In March this year, GosuGamers organized a successful petition to make ClanBase » include StarCraft as a nations cup game. Even to create such a thing took us a fairly huge effort since we had to gather the voice of a big percentage of the community for them to see that we existed. Once done, an administrator was chosen for the league and season one was successfully hosted, with » Germany beating Finland in the finals. The ClanBase site, however, was not organized for the type of game play required for StarCraft nation vs nation matches and caused lots of troubles for both players and team leaders. This and other factors lead to 
Lord_Marine's resigning from ClanBase and the announcement that season two of the nations cup was never going to happen. Since then no word has been heard from the ClanBase staff regarding the status of season two and no search for new administrators has been made, even though ClanBase received several top class applications for the job earlier this year. How will this partnership affect the SC-community?
ClanBase has something Global Gaming Leauge is acting like they are missing; experience how to organize ladders. ClanBase has for six years done nothing but hosting ladders and leagues. They have experience within the gaming scene because their crew mainly consists of true born gamers themselves. Global Gaming League has something ClanBase, on the other hand, clearly lacks; money, resources for public media marketing and a commercial interest in the games. Combining these two clearly creates the potential to host something big for the community. Just imagine yourself a nations cup with $4000 in prize money, great organization, available administrators and a daily updated coverage by SG. Wouldn't this put back the spirit and prestige into national teams for real?
Whether it is to this dream scenario we are heading or perhaps into just another couple of seasons with wasted money in a ladder no one participates in remains to be proven!
So far no word has been said regarding a merge between the two homepages or a new name for the two sites. We are waiting anxiously for the first announcements for the new 1on1 season, an expected change of ladder settings which
PuertoRican (GGL) hinted about or announcements regarding a new season of the nations cup. Check SG.com for the latest.Please note that the above text is based on experiences and conclusions drawn from a StarCraft point of view and does not necessarily represent the respective sites/organizations in the correct manner when operating with other games than StarCraft.
Links
ClanBase.com - Press release about GGL & CB
ClanBase.com - Official homepage ClanBase
GGLeague.com - Official homepage of Global Gaming League
