Announcing the QLASH StarCraft2 Community Series

With the QLASH Casters Invitational done and dusted we are now extremely happy to announce that we will be launching our first Community focused event around StarCraft2. Our goal with our Community Series will be to give attention and exposure to players that are usually not within the spotlight and maybe help them grow to the next level in their gaming career.

The format and rules

We will run 8 separate online tournaments that will all be ran on the EU Battle.net server unless both players agree to have them on a different one. All tournaments will be with a single elimination bracket and all matches of the bracket will be Bo3 except the finals of each tourney which will be a Bo5.

The brackets will be ran through the Challonge tool and there will be a dedicated admin for each of the tournaments. We will post details on how to register for each of the events on our Twitter accounts as well as on the TL website event thread.

Each tournament will be limited to 128 participants and only players with rank of Diamond and above are allowed to participate. If you notice players who is below the rank of below Diamond we ask you to report them to the admin and they will be deleted from the bracket.

- The bracket will be single elimination
- The seeding will be random
- For the BO3 matches the veto process is going to be: ABBA BAC (the higher seed will act as A)
- For the BO5 match the veto process is going to be: AB ABABC (the higher seed will act as A)

Map pool: current ladder map pool

Automaton LE (2)
Cyber Forest LE (2)
Kairos Junction LE (2)
King's Cove LE (2)
New Repugnancy LE (2)
Port Aleksander LE (2)
Year Zero LE (2)

Other rules:

- Skins and sprays are allowed, unless your opponent asks you to turn them off / not use them
- Switching races in-between a series is not allowed
- In case of a disconnect, the game has to be resumed from replay
- In case of a draw, the map will be replayed

After each separate tournament is completed the winner will qualify to a final Ro8 bracket. As such, any winners of the tournaments should not participate in more than one of them, or they will be automatically assigned a loss in any of the consecutive event bracket. The final bracket between the winners of the 8 events will be played in Bo5 format.

You can find answers to all the questions you might have in our StarCraft2 dedicated Discord server!

The in-game channel of the event will be QLASHCommunity.

Focusing on the community - WCS points limit

Even though it will be an open event, we will actually limit participation to players that have 100 or less WCS points throughout the previous season or the one before that. If in any of those two seasons a player has acquired more than 100 points he will not be eligible to win our prizes and will be automatically disqualified. Since it is not possible to check every single registered player, we will only be checking on the two finalists of each event that will also get some prizes.

Another important rule is that players must play on their main account and not use hidden nicknames (barcodes). Such players will be automatically assigned a loss in the bracket and consequently eliminated.

The above rules are crucial to make sure that the tournament is not swarmed with established pro players or people trying to hide their true identity. We know the StarCraft2 Community to be extremely mature and we are sure that such cases will be almost non-existent.

The schedule

The tournaments will run once a week every Wednesday and all of them will start at 18:00 CET. We will only skip one week during IEM Katowice on February 27th. Full schedule below:

1st event - February 6th
2nd event - February 13th
3rd event - February 20th
4th event - March 6th
5th event - March 13th
6th event - March 20th
7th event - March 27th
8th event - April 3rd

Final Ro8 bracket composed of the winners: to be announced

The cool part

The online tournaments will be streamed live by no other than our common favorite Kevin ‘Rotterdam’ van der Kooi on our StarCraft2 dedicated Twitch channel. He might get some good company from time to time but overall he will be the one jumping into games and giving his usual entertaining flavour. After all, the idea here is to show off what the StarCraft2 Community can do and who better to do that then one of the most prominent casters in the scene.

All of the 8 tournaments will be streamed and will also have a prizepool of 100$ each. The prize-pool will be split between the winner and runner-up at 70$ to 30$.

Additionally, as you could have guessed, the winner of the final Ro8 bracket will also get a little something. The champion of the first QLASH StarCraft2 Community Series will be sent out to a WCS live event this year with all travel and accommodation expenses covered by us.

We hope you are as excited about this initiative as much as we are. We invite you all to participate and remember that even if you don’t reach the finals you might still be commented on by Rotti, which we think is pretty cool by itself!