World Championship Series:<br>Q&A with Ilja Rotelli

CONTENTS

WCS Ground Points

Before we going into the Q&A session, Ilja Rotelli took a few minutes to quickly debrief us on the rough outlines of the World Championship series and how is it different from the content that the rest of the eSports industry is producing. Listed were the main goals of the tournament and why is it structured the way it is. At the end of the presentation, we learned the following things:

The World Championship Series is an opportunity for the company to play a different, supportive role, than the one of the eSports industry.

According to Ilja Rotelli, the eSports industry strives to create the best possible content with the best possible players and monetizing this content via sponsorship. What it does not do is enhance the participatory side of eSports and this is what Blizzard are trying to do: give other heroes the chance to shine provided, of course, that said heroes are good in the game.

How is all this accomplished? By building a global tournament, much like the World Cup in soccer or the Olympic Games and building it from the top down: peaking at the grand finals and going down to continental finals, national finals and national qualifiers. Once this infrastructure has reached the grass roots, Blizzard and WCS can start creating heroes on all levels.

What is the essence of the World Championship Series? It is something different that coexists and is synergetic with the eSports industry but which tries to reach different markets and different levels and types of excitement.

The World Championship Series is not the only eSports program that Blizzard is working on. By playing a supportive role, Blizzard will be announcing in the future even more programs that will reach and back up other aspects of the scene.

Talks about Blizzard All-Stars are happening.

Q&A

Q: I wonder what kind of reception are you seeing from fans from a specific nation? The reason I bring this up is because one of the things I found in StarCraft is that it’s kind of a homogenous environment. Like myself: I cheer for Naniwa a lot, who is a Swedish player playing in Korea and I live in Canada. And I think a lot of fans have that same approach, they don’t necessarily identify the player with a specific nation. With the qualifier already taking place, I wonder if you are seeing this?

A: This is something we will only learn at the end of the cycle. Right now, through the qualifiers, we see familiar faces appearing but they will not become relevant until the time comes for continental or global finals.

I do believe that StarCraft 2 has a global community and I do believe people support players regardless of nationality. The topic of the WCS is “what does inspire you to become a better player” which is an idea very dear to blizzard.

Turning a viewership sport into a participatory sport means that not only will you know that there are awesome players out there, but there’s also the notion that you can be one of them. If the people playing on the international scale are read as being “far away” the chance that one can connect with the notion of “Oh, I can be that guy” is not very high.

I believe that the current SC2 leagues and this world cup can very well live together, they just strive for different things.

Q: Going to the idea of grass roots, it sounds like you’re trying to create something like the MTG Pro Tours or the Friday Night Magic and build local gaming communities where will know that a player from your local gaming store will be going to this tournament and you want to track his record and cheer for him. But the difference here is that StarCraft is inherently an online game. So what kind of difficulties are you seeing thus far? Because if you have any tournaments in America, for example, you will have thousands of people from every state and you will have the issue where the top player or the top three are from the east coast and it’s like “He’s not my local player at all”.

A: America is particularly complicated because the distances are so huge. But there are local communities that can be relevant. One such example is the college. In American football, the rivalry between colleges and the communities built around that are very strong and college sports are almost as big as professional sports in this country.

So while the distances here are that big, I think we create different subsets of communities that one can relate to, be it college, city or state, there are subgroups even when you go online. In order to create participatory sport, you need to provide challenges at every level. You can be the best of the kinds from your school, or from your facebook circle of friends, or city, or state, or college.

Q: You successfully worked with a lot of organizations like Playhem and ESL to bring out the best players on local level, but there’ll be always that moment when the viewer only cares about the big names, the Naniwas and DRGs of the world. Do you think there can be a space in the WCS where you gather all those GSL and MLG winners and place them against the local winners? Or will it just be going from bottom to top and this is how it’ll remain?

A: We feel that the eSports industry is already taking care of the big names and the viewership aspect of the competition extremely well and we are supporting them and not just our WCS. But the experiment with the WCS is of another type. For example, when I watch the Olympics, the names that are competing there are for the bigger part unknown. I don’t know who the best skier out there is. But I get excited because I see an Italian flag and I know who to cheer for.

So we are trying to experiment within the StarCraft 2 space to see if this type of connection can still and if people that traditionally will not be supported by the rest of the industry get some support. It’s more challenging, certainly, but we felt that creating yet another tournament that exactly repeats what the eSports industry is doing was not a good use of our time and effort. With that in mind, I do believe that known faces will appear at the world championship. But there will also be examples of unknown players doing extraordinary things and will send a message you can actually break into the eSports industry.

Q: You kind of take participation as a good thing, as a good goal. But what kind of value does the participatory eSport have for pleasure because we’ve seen the example of Korean BroodWar, by just focusing on creating a highest quality spectator product, can keep the game alive and keep people interested in it for almost a decade, or more. So what’s the value seen in participation?

A: I guess from obvious perspective, Blizzard has its own business goals that are different from the ones of the eSports industry. We are a published that makes video games.

That alone should answer the question why Blizzard’s goal is creating eSports programs that encourage people the play the game. We make amazing games, we want more and more people to play them, and we feel that eSports is a great way to encourage such behavior. Our games are competitive and by creating an infrastructure that makes you feel a part of a competitive community is a great way to inspire participation.

Q: So you don’t think spectator games can sell copies?

A: I’ve seen different evidence in the past – it can and it cannot. For example, let’s look at the Korean scene. It feels like – and that is solely my interpretation – Brood War was first a participatory sport and then became a viewership sport. I do believe viewership multiplies the participation but it remains to be proven to me that without a strong participatory element, viewership by itself multiplies participation.

Q: I wonder what Blizzard’s policy is when dealing with abusing the system. Specifically for WCS USA there have been two cases of hacking – one confirmed and one that is about 90% certain. Is this something you are going to leave to the organizers on local level like Playhem and Beyond Gaming or are you going to personally stop these players in taking part in WCS in the future?

A: This is a question that has been discussed by Blizzard in the past few days. Clearly, when it comes to events like the WCS that are our events, we’d want to take the entire initiative in the judicial process.

In the case you mentioned, our hacking team looked through the evidence that we had and for the second case there weren’t conclusive evidence that pointed to hacking. So we operated in the assumption of innocence in the absence of proof.

In general, I would want to see Blizzard going forwards by creating a process that is transparent to the community and one that creates guidelines that Blizzard uses for their events to outline what is considered cheating, what kinds of penalties are in place, and why a certain route rather than the other is taken rather than when a case is brought to the table.

It’s about creating standards that the industry can choose to embrace. Obviously, we are not going to tell MLG or GSL how to deal with these cases in their tournaments which have their own rules and structures. But I can certainly open a conversation about these topics and incorporate the feedback in the system they choose to adopt.

Q: I get it how you want to create heroes on local levels that the audience can cheer for but my concern is how are you going to advertise it? Because 80-90% of the group that you are targeting right now is already interested in eSports.

A: We hope that the very nature of competitive games and eSports will come in play. We feel that often it is the existing players that bring new players into the community and the more amazing experiences we can deliver to our players, the more you’ll want to share this experience with those around you. In terms of eSports marketing, it feels that if I have money and effort, I’d rather spend them on achieving this.

One such example is the Barcraft. We did nothing to start the Barcraft movement, it’s just one of those amazing communities that sprung out of the idea of “I want to share my experience of watching eSports with my friends. Other people do it in bars, so I want to do the same.” And now we see how Barcrafts are exposing more and more people to eSports. That is one example of non-traditional marketing and we want to pour more fuel to the fire and I’d rather support the Barcraft movement than go out there and buy runner ads in order to get more people involved in eSports.

Q: Talking about Heart of the Swarm, will there be something that tells the casual gamer that there’s also this thing called eSports and he can check out this stream or that tournament you are organizing? This is obviously something you can without spending money on ads.

A: We’ll definitely want to expose every StarCraft player to eSports. I have a mental list of the stuff that will be happening just this year but nothing beyond this.

Q: I think one of the things we found out in our communities is that just because you enjoy eSports doesn’t mean that you are actively playing SC2. In fact, we have a lot of users that don’t actually own the game but they enjoy it. So I wonder if you recognize this and if it’s something you looked at. Because there’s the Diablo community and the World of Warcraft community, a big part of which doesn’t know that something like professional StarCraft 2 exists but can be approached with the notion of “If you like Blizzard products, there’s something you might enjoy”.

A: What you say is the testament of the quality of the viewership experience of StarCraft – even if you don’t play it, you might still enjoy watching it. I’m not sure if I interpret your question correctly, though. Are you saying that we should propose to Diablo community, or the WoW community, to watch more StarCraft?

Q: It’s about contacting all the Blizzard community at the top level instead of specifically targeting the StarCraft side. Because, from what we discussed internally, StarCraft’s business model is that of a single purchase so you don’t necessarily have a continually growing customer base. With Wings of Liberty, we’re already two years in so all those casual players who may not have discovered eSports are probably not playing any more or maybe will come back with the expansion. So I wondered if you have any plans to go after those players who are still within the Blizzard community either through WoW, or Diablo, or just the global Blizzard website?

A: I don’t have a specific plan which I can comment right now but the general concept of exposing the eSports community to others outside StarCraft 2 is obviously very important to us. We feel that the eSports industry has generated an entire life-style and is very representative of the values that Blizzard wants to deliver to its customers of every franchise. So we are very, very humbled by what the eSports industry has done. And yes, we want to acquaint anybody that plays WoW or Diablo with the thing called eSports. As to specific tactics on how to achieve that, I don’t have much.

Q: Just on that, there are currently many fansites with already established game communities that are trying to find holes into those other franchises. For example, I have a large Diablo fanbase and I also do StarCraft commentary and I’ve had people that are just here for Diablo seeing StarCraft saying “This is cool, I like it, I’ll check out the game.” This is maybe something you can consider for your Diablo or WoW sites, just bring the people to the other franchise as well. Because I know that has happened for me.

A: We’ll definitely consider it, yes!

Q: Do you think it’s possible that StarCraft is genetically too hard a game to be as successful participatory eSport as some other games? If yes, do you think it’s necessary or would you be willing to maybe compromise some of the competitiveness at the highest level to make it more accessible?

A: I can give a couple of examples I guess.

The first one is I don’t think the original StarCraft 1 was dramatically easier to play than StarCraft 2 but despite of that it enjoyed a huge success as a participatory sport. For the second example I will go back to Magic the Gathering, probably one of the most complicated strategy games out there. In spite of its complexity, it’s played by hundreds of thousands of people globally.

So the complexity of the game alone to me doesn’t prevent it to become a strong competitive sport. I think if we can put more effort in explaining the game, we can do a better job in creating an introductory experience for the game and also communicating with and helping out players teach the game to others. We already mentioned this goal of having players share their experiences.

Certainly, it’s not as easy as playing tetris but it is a niche phenomenon that has proven to be one of the most successful PC games of all time and a lot of people are playing so that it is testimony to the fact that it can be learned. Can we do a better job at teaching one how to play the game? Yes. Can we do a better job at supporting players to teach others the game? Absolutely. And by communicating eSports we’ll encourage people to play. I think that by just showing what eSports is provides a motivation to overcome the competition.

Q: You keep drawing analogies to Magic the Gathering and I want to go back to poker. In poker, it’s much more a participatory game and there’re local tournaments and scene and that’s what it sounds like you are trying to create. But at the same time, eSports in general is all about entertainment value and there will be a bit of balance where if you go too much towards the grass roots, you will be promoting an eSport that is not entertaining. Someone who is coming across eSports for the first time and is watching Platinum level players might turn away from the product.

So I guess my ultimate question is how is this going to tie in to when eSports is trying to compare poker to football. I’m never gonna play a game of football in my life, I just can’t do it, but I can still enjoy it. While in poker, I can understand the game, I can see what’s going on, it’s a participatory sport and people who play it generally make the move back and forth. So using those, how can you explain what your goal is, because I think many of us cannot understand what you are trying to do with the WCS in terms of long term vision.

A: I guess the type of sport we are trying to build is explained by one of the analogies I often use. Think American football. I enjoy football but that doesn’t drive me the next day to run to the field and start tackling people. But when I watch golf, or soccer (which in Italy, from where I come from, is a participatory sport) I want to go out with my office buddies on Friday night and play it.

I don’t think the barrier to playing StarCraft is as big as American football. I can choose to watch StarCraft and play it as a result. And definitely not every game will be enjoyable to watch on a larger scale. I do think that the games we’ll see at continental and global levels will be extremely enjoyable.

But as I said, part of this is an experiment and I will be able to tell the full story at the end of the year. I also know, by looking at the viewership numbers, that a lot of the stuff that happens on Twitch.tv or the content that people consume is not entirely the high-end content of SC. There’s interest in watching streams of your friends, there’s interest in watching the matches of communities that you can somehow relate to. With Blizzard games, there’re obviously high-level players but there’s also average players. In spite of that, people share their replays and looking at each other’s games – in different way, of course, they do not fool themselves that they are watching the Super Bowl of SC2 – but it’s still relevant to them.

So I agree that going to the grass roots will not always generate a particularly compelling content, especially compared to the content that the eSports industry is creating, but I think it’s automatically relevant to the communities from which it originates.

Q: Just to go back to the Magic/Poker analogies quickly, I think there’s a significant difference between them. In Magic, you can go to a Friday Night Magic, lose everything and still have fun. But StarCraft is much more like poker in this sense. In poker, if you lose 20 straight hands, you are not having fun and the same goes for StarCraft. Many of the guys here can agree – watching StarCraft is fun, winning at StarCraft fun.

But, generally, playing StarCraft is the most stressful thing in the world and after losing all this hate for yourself comes out. And soccer is the same like MTG – you can go play with your friends, lose, and still have fun. So this is why I’m worried that encouraging the participatory side of things might chase people away from SC2.

A: Well, our numbers are saying that a lot of people are suffering with you.

There are a number of reasons why human beings don’t stop doing what they do and one of them is challenging themselves so I’d rather not get into that conversation about whether or not SC is fun or stressful to play. If there are many peoples that do it, there must be a reason why they are doing it and so we are trying to provide this reason to even more players to encourage participation.

Q: This year the way WCS works is you have pretty much one event at a small level where one can participate. It’s very focused around one point of time and can make one think “Oh, I will just practice for three weeks for this and then I’m not going to do anything.” For this year it’s understandable, but for the next – when you will already have the base – how do you plan to create a more consistent interest?

A: I also think that the path to the WCS needs to be a consistent experience and not just be a single one-shot or a series of, say, three one-shot events. Not much to offer right now in terms of what we have in store but that is central to what we are designing. So yes, we’d love to have a program that generates participation throughout the year.

The challenge with the WCS was deciding whether to build the pyramid from the grass roots up or from the top down it felt that it was an easier proposition to build an inspirational component into the infrastructure of the grass roots that will inspire continuous effort. We tell you what you can be!

Q: You compared the WCS to the world cup of SC2. So what is your position towards ESWC and WCG?

A: We love the WCG, we feel they have some goals that are, to some extent, similar to ours but we think that with the WCS, we can build StarCraft as the centerpiece of our eSports infrastructure as opposed to being a part of a larger eSports program. The WCS is just a more focused tournament, operating in various countries in proportion to the SC2 communities in them. WCG operates in the counties under different priorities.

Thus, I think the WCS has unique aspects that the WCG infrastructure does not have.

Q: So there will be a total of three world champions in StarCraft 2, coming from the WCG, WCS and ESWC. It’s not like soccer where you only have the World Cup to become world champion.

A: Well, in soccer you can become the Olympic champion, World Cup champion, you can be the world champion by club. There are a variety of ways to become world champion in pretty much every sport besides American football.

Each of those tournaments has its merit, I am not saying that the WCS world champion is better than the WCG world champion.

Q: I have a two part question for the current season of the WCS. In Europe, the countries are given different number of slots, calculated on the size of the playing population. This took some of our readers aback: they saw Germany having four spots, Ukraine having only two. So there was a very large discussion about the “traditional” StarCraft countries and people were criticizing and wondering “Why Germany has twice as many spots as Ukraine? Why Sweden has three and the others have less?”

The second part is about the USA Nationals, where there’s a combination between qualifiers and invites and many readers considered this unfair: “Why would only USA have invites and not the European countries?”

So do you see this as legitimate concerns and do you plan to do adjustments in the future?

A: Right now, the procedure we use to allocate slots is just taking the SC2 populations and creating proportions with the total number of slots in mind. We have mitigated that a little, I think we’ve privileged a little bit Korea and Taiwan based on the fact that they have very active professional scene but that’s the only alteration we did. Everything else is a fair and square mimicking the size of the population.

We will recalculate the slots every year based on the change of Battle.net population size.

On your second question: we approached different eSports organizations and we said “We have slots for nationals and we want to reward existing leagues with these slots. So please come to us and tell us how you would spend these slots if we gave them to you.” So we then look at the proposals and when we see a reasonable one – based on the level of competition, for example – we award them with slots. And this process was open to everybody, we actively approached organizations with the inquiry of if they want slots for nationals.

Q: I am wondering what your metric for measuring success of the regional qualifiers is, specifically on a country level. Because particularly small countries are not particularly interesting to the global audience and I think part of the reason for that is the accessibility to highest level of StarCraft is very, very easy. At every moment, I can tune to the streams of some of the best players in the world.

A: I am very interested in participants and very interested in the viewership numbers of the finals like continental finals or the global championship. And next year, it would be incredibly interesting to see the participation level at the grass roots that WCS generates. This will be my success or failure so to speak. I will be either looking at a growth curve or I won’t, in which case I will be learning a lesson.

Q: Is your goal activating new users, or providing competition for existing ones?

A: It’s both, although the second one is easier so if you ask me what am I likely to be targeting first is existing StarCraft players by providing them with a reason to say “I will go to my college gaming club on Wednesday and compete in this tournament because there will be prizes, or because it’s a cool event, or because this is where my friends are”.

So yes, participation is, basically, my win or lose.

Q: Creating a system where players can identify themselves as the best in the country or the best on the continent is great but at the end of the day, everybody knows that Koreans are by far the best. Do you think that one country being obviously the best weakens the entire motivational structure?

A: I will go back to Magic.

When Magic Pro Tour started, the USA was more or less unbeatable and for the first couple of seasons it was very hard for Europeans or for players from other regions to compete. Things changed and MTG became true global sport.

The second thing is, I’m not trying to sell the notion that anybody can become a world champion. What I’m trying to do is provide the player with a level of competition that is relevant to him. I might feel comfortable knowing that I am the third best from my Facebook friends and there should be a system that allows me to know that and stimulate me to play and become #1. And once I am that, I go with other #1 Facebook players to some sort of a local event.

There will be many players competing at this level and many of them will be fine being where they are. But again there will be a subsection of those who’ll want to be something more.

On the other hand, as eSports grows, the systems that made the Koreans so good might replicate elsewhere. There are institutions in the USA that taking different approaches to creating eSports athletes. Either we believe that’s never going to happen outside Korea, or we do believe that sooner or later those systems will be applied elsewhere as well whether in one, five or ten years.

And that is the challenge of breaking those walls and seeing eSports as global phenomenon and not just a Korean phenomenon. And as the eSports industry does not have this as a goal, this is a great opportunity for Blizzard to play this role.

Editor's take

I remember when StarCraft 2 beta launched and people experienced the leagues and divisions system for the first time.

Few people were actually happy and the bigger part of the community expressed their dislike towards the system as one could not accurately compare oneself with everybody else. Being top eight in Diamond meant nothing besides being the eight best in a random sample of 100. Two years after the game's release it still doesn't and the only league that adequately labels you and puts you in the proper context is server's Grandmaaster but Grandmaster players already know that they are the best of the best and have far more and better structured opportunities to paint themselves on the big eSports canvas. For the rest of the player base it meant grinding the ladder over and over for the hopes of a promotion that, ironically, couldn't be translated and appraised.

From this writer's standpoint, WCS has the chance to fix this. If the participatory side of competitive StarCraft is indeed enhanced (which, to be honest, is the greatest challenge ahead of Blizzard), the actively playing crowd will be presented with multitude of levels which it can fight to reach and which have some kind of actual meaning. When that "top eight Diamond" is reworded to say "top three in Leads, UK" it receives a whole other meaning. In addition, the way the WCS is structured guarantees that there will also be another level for you to aim at. After all, winning a Go4SC2 monthly finals and a national qualifier might have the same impact but there are much more layers directly hooked to the national qualifier than there are to the Go4SC2 tournaments, for example. And that is what it's all about.

Talking from the standpoint of a die-hard of competitive gamer ever since I got my first Magic the Gathering deck (it was white and it sucked), creating a layered competitive community is, essentially, a must for a game like StarCraft. Currently, the StarCraft 2 scene has humongous gaps between casual gamers, low- and mid-tier pros and highest level of contenders not only in terms of skill but in terms of connectivity. If Rotelli and his WCS achieve the ambitions goals they have set before themselves, we are looking into pouring concrete into those pits and laying a tangible road to competitive heights.

It sounds heavenly but where can it go wrong?

Many of the concerns were already expressed by my colleagues in the Q&A session. The stardom level and the entertainment value of the national qualifiers (and even of the national finals) will likely be very low, meaning few people will watch it and, consequently, few people will be inspired to actively play competitively. This will also mean that there's the chance of the WCS being put on tray in fans' minds until the continental and global finals hit the streams at which point it will be a tournament no different than DreamHack or MLG, where viewers cheer for their favorite player, and not the one carrying their national flag. And the whole concept of the WCS is diluted and mixed with the rest of the eSports industry.

In addition, there's also the real possibility that the level of "relating to a certain community" does not correspond to the amount of money and effort put into a huge enterprise like the WCS. Believing that the tournament will unplug the bottleneck cork and the flow of competitive gamers will run strong is good but might prove no more than a wishful thinking in one year's time. As Ilja Rotelli said, this will measure his success and will teach him a lesson.

It's easy to be pessimistic about such an endeavor but there ought to be a system out there that inspires people to play StarCraft, oughtn't it?