Yesterday, Blizzard announced their fourth Battle.Net ladder tournament. This time it works a bit different from last time. Seperated ladders with invited gamers and qualified players from the ordinary ladders will be held. Read more!
Blizzard is truly doing what they can to keep their community alive. Their StarCraft tournament Sandlot just got itself an update today (read more » here), and as late as yesterday they came out with the preview for the Ladder Season 4 playoffs. Unlike previous seasons, Blizzard have come up with a new type of qualification system. It includes opening up three new ladders that will have ~125 players in each. This new system is a way to focus more on competitive gaming, they write in the official preview news.
These new ladders will be Europe, Americas and Asia-based, and "each will function as a standard Battle.net solo ladder, with their own web interface displaying rankings, and their own map pools", and the famous AMM system will not be the same. Lower ranked players can just as well face off against a higher seeded player. This has been implemented due to the low player amount on the ladders.
25 players from each region (Americas, Europe and Asia) will be invited by Blizzard and will thereby be able to play and view the ladder. The rest of the players will be qualified from the regional ladders; Top 100 players will also be invited to this Ladder Season 4 tournament. Lordaeron and Azeroth will be joined, thus the Top 50 players will qualify from each ladder.
When the ladder period is over, the 20 best players from Europe and Asia and from Americas will play in regional offline finals to determine which 16 players are to advance to the global finals, an event solely for the purpose of closing the ladder with a bang. The ladder will be going on for approximately two months. No dates have been announced as of yet. Will we see 1.21 before this event? Only time will tell.
Links
Battle.Net - Battle.Net Ladder Season 4