[s]event_wcg[/s]

The ICM, the marketing company behind the World Cyber Games is constantly in motion, constantly trying to find new ways to improve, advance, and evolve. New nominations tourney systems, and the host city biddings, just like the real Olympics. All this changes occurred in the past year putting WCG on the frontiers of the e-sport scene. And this year is no different. This time around WCG is taking on the online world.

Two years ago WCG presented an alternative to its regular offline preliminaries for big countries with no distinct gaming hotspots (such as USA) – the less hustle and more accessible online preliminaries, which allowed those who were short on time, money or both to participate in the biggest offline e-sports event of the year. And yesterday WCG has taken one more step in that direction by launching its own online ladder system, fully equipped with an anti-hack launcher. The WCGZone.

The WCGZone is not just another ladder system. According to the WCG Website it serves four main purposes:

»Year-round online matches for Starcraft:Brood War and Warcraft III(FIFA 2006 and Counter Strike are soon to be launched as well)
»Players' rankings/replay file service
»Online forums that are open to global gamers.
»Host online preliminaries

In one swift move the ICM takes on all the community sites(such as yours truly), all the replay sites(such as yaoyuan), and all the private servers(such as PGTour). That is quite a challenge, but with the support from the fathers of the games(the ladder is hosted on official battle.net server) and the monetary backup from the corporate monster SAMSUNG, WCGZone certainly will be one tough competitor.
And the money is already pouring in. Between May 16th and June 16th this year the WCG is hosting three events in which you can become a lucky owner of one of the 5 Samsung Digimax V5 Cameras, 10 nVidia Gforce FX5600 Video cards, 9 Samsung Yepp 256Mb Mp3 players, or 30 Razer Mice/Mousepads.

Run for your lives Brood War activists!

Links
WCG - Official WCG Statement
WCGZone - Home of WCGZone
WCGZone - More info on events and prizes

WCG launches the Zone