The Netease E-Sports League has gathered the cream of the crop of Chinese Hearthstone as ten of the leading teams of the country are off to the races for $30,000. Now, there's a convenient way to follow all that action.
Chinese eSports - and Hearthstone in particular - has always been hard to follow for western fans. With most of the tournaments being streamed on local Chinese platforms (not to mention the language barrier), a large chunk of the global scene remained in the dark for the English speaking audience.
We've always been fans of reporting on reporting from all ends of the world, however, and this month we walked a few important steps towards engaging our audience with Chinese eSports. The first one was less than two weeks ago when we announced that DouYu TV streams are now officially supported on GosuGamers, which should create a convenient gateway for this part of our readership which wants to peak into the scene.
Over this past week, we've been preparing for step number two, which will mostly interest the Hearthstone fans in a few ways. Firstly, as we promised in one of our previous GosuRankings posts, we've been hard at work backlogging the major Chinese Hearthstone 1v1 tournaments and creating a database of players and teams. As a result, a few days ago we enabled the China georankings - the standings are still young, ranking a little over 60 players, but we're confident it'll all be developed further.
Secondly, as far as Chinese tournaments go, we've created a convenient home for one of the biggest out there, the two-months-long, $30,000 NEL team league, featuring 10 of the best Hearthstone teams in China.
Every information about the tournament is available on our all-in-one coverage hub, which collects news, results, standings, upcoming matches, VODs and streams in one tight package. As of the time of this article, more than 100 NEL VODs have been added to the hub!
Having such information one click away is something that excites us a lot. As a coverage portal, this is a priceless opportunity for us to bring you an even more diverse content and take a look at what the Chinese are playing. Are they behind the meta as western pros say? Are they brewing unique decklists as they did during the first ever clash between west and east at the NA vs CN Masters? The new king of the GosuRankings might even be in the making there, on Chinese ground.
Another partilalry interesting aspect about NEL is that every class is represented at least twice in each series. This means that even if the western scene completely abandons some class, Hearthstone fans will always know that our VOD section will always have fresh content across all nine characters.
In VOD-related news, after the recent NEL VODs upload session, our database has grown to feature more than 1,100 Hearthstone games, spread over more than 300 series. As we mentioned in a recent Twitter post, if the average Hearthstone game is ten minutes long, one would nead almost eight days of non-stop watching to go through the entire database. And by the time he/she is done, we'll have a lot more, as we won't stop adding.
Our @PlayHearthstone VOD section now features 1,100+ games over 320+ series. http://t.co/wAKwoH5Pej
— GosuGamersHS (@GosuGamersHS) August 31, 2014
If the average HS game is 10min long, that makes 187+ hrs of footage! And we're still adding more! http://t.co/wAKwoH5Pej
— GosuGamersHS (@GosuGamersHS) August 31, 2014
To close this post, here's a class breakdown on the number of games currently in the database:
Druid: 411
Hunter: 174
Mage: 152
Paladin: 159
Priest: 92
Rogue: 269
Shaman: 260
Warlock: 326
Warrior: 246
