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Blizzard announced through their official Battle.net blog that the final games for all three regions will be played at the same time, August 10-11, causing a direct overlap with Dota 2's biggest event The International 3 (August 7-11).
The decision to stack so much StarCraft 2 content in the aforementioned manner comes out as a weird one to the StarCraft 2 community and eSports fans alike. While Season 1 scheduling provided a very well spaced dates for the closing games (the only overlap being the Code S grand finals and the WCS America Ro8, played on June 1st but still with quite a lot of hours in between), the Season 2 times will require SC2 fans to endure quite the streaming marathon if they want to catch every game.
This scheduling is furthermore in direct conflict with another premier eSports event, namely Valve's The International for Dota 2 - which is as of currently the biggest eSports event to date with a $2,6 million prize pool, and growing - meaning it will prove difficult if not impossible for fans of both games to follow the events.
To comment on this overlap, Blizzard's senior eSports manager Kim Phan addressed the community via reddit, mentioning the unworkable complexity of the circuit.
We wanted to clarify a few points regarding the timing of the WCS Season 2 League Finals. Given the intricacies of coordinating schedules between multiple regions and partners, travel requirements for pro-gamers, availability of appropriate venues, and more, it's quite a challenge to align all these often conflicting priorities. When we add in the schedules of other events which we have no control over, this adds another layer of unworkable complexity.
So how did we arrive at the dates for the major WCS Season 2 events? What we knew is that we wanted to have ESL produce a world-class Finals event at gamescom in Germany in late August, which they'll be announcing more details about very soon. That meant working the schedule backward from that point. In order to give partners enough time to plan and execute for a global Season 2 Finals at gamescom, there was only a small window of opportunity for us to have the various regional finals.
Unfortunately this has resulted in overlaps with other major eSports events. These conflicts were certainly not intentional. This simple fact is that as eSports has grown with more events, more games, and more viewers; it's nearly impossible to avoid all conflicts. Many major weekend events already host multiple games, which are running simultaneous game streams in conflict with each other.
That said, we do understand the various concerns that players, teams, and viewers have with this particular conflict and as we have in the past, will continue to do our best to avoid this type of overlap in the future.
The last games before the EU/NA playoffs and the KR grand final will be played in the next three weeks, starting today with the WCS Korea round of 8.
Source: Battle.net
