Thursday, April 12, 2012

Spring StarCraft II Arena I

MLG announced the format for the first Spring Arena today and it sounds pretty great. It's an 8 player event with the top 8 from the last MLG getting the invites. (One of them dropped out so #9 is going as well.) They're going to play a round robin to start so there's going to be a ton of great matches. Especially since each competitor knows exactly who they're up against and has quite a lot of time to come up with specific game plans for beating each other.

Interestingly enough they're bringing in more analysts than players! They're going to have 6 commentators, an observer (who controls the camera on the main stream) and 3 race specific experts. I'm not sure how the race specific experts are going to work out (part of me things if they were that expert they'd be playing in the event but part of me accepts that someone can know a lot of the strategy without having the in-game control to pull it off at the very top of the world) but it's an interesting idea and I'm curious to see it in action.

They're going to be running 7 streams at once! At most 2 games at a time (with only 8 players it would be tricky to pull off more than that for any stretch of time) but they're going to stream both player's viewpoints from every game. Watching MarineKingPrime's screen to see what he's looking at when he does his crazy micro could be pretty great.

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