The world championship for the four main Blizzard games (besides Diablo) is set to start on October 28. The event, starring Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2 will run to the 7th of November at which point there will be a grand finale held at Blizzcon.
While the Blizzcon tickets (even the virtual ones) sport quite a high price the tournaments themselves are thankfully free and will be both streamed and archived on Twitch and Youtube. And speaking of money, its interesting to note that WoW, Hearthstone and Starcraft 2 all have a prize pool of $250,000 while Heroes of the Storm doubles that with its $500,000 prize pool. This bodes well for the future of HotS if Blizzard considers it worthy of being the "main star" of the championship.
I'm on the other hand most interested in the Hearthstone tournament. Even though I don't play the game as much as I used to its still damn good fun to watch the pros play, ideally with other people around so you can collectively shout at almost impossible RNG or game-winning top-decks.
The WoW tournament is also something that interests me greatly, though for completely different reasons. Back when I played WoW (and this was only a few months ago) the PvP community was in an uproar over a lack of content and major balance issues that plagued the arena. I want to see if the balance team stepped up and fixed the issues or if we're going to see the same few team compositions slog it out in overly long matches that get decided in a couple of seconds. Hopefully the former and this ends up being the tournament WoW PvP needs to boost its popularity up as its fallen on hard times lately.
Besides that little niggle of doubt I fully expect this week to be filled with excitement, drama and more competitive matches than a sane person could watch in a single week. If you'd like to join in but aren't sure about the brackets or schedule, or anything else really, head over here and simply chose the game you're interested and all shall be revealed. In the event that you're just interested in the short version, I've listed the start times of all the tournaments below:
Starcraft 2
10:00 a.m. PST (5:00 p.m. UTC) - November 1
12:00 p.m. PST (7:00 p.m. UTC)- November 6
12:30 p.m. PST (7:30 p.m. UTC)- November 7World Of Warcraft
1:30 p.m. PDT (8:30 p.m. UTC) - October 30-31
12:00 p.m. PST (7:00 p.m. UTC) - November 6
3:00 p.m. PST (10:00 p.m. UTC) - November 7Hearthstone
9:00 a.m. PDT (4:00 p.m. UTC) - October 28-31
12:00 p.m. PST (7:00 p.m. UTC) - November 6
10:30 a.m. PST (5:30 p.m. UTC) - November 7Heroes of the Storm
1:30 p.m. PDT (8:30 p.m. UTC) - October 28
4:00 p.m. PST (11:00 p.m. UTC) - November 6
9:30 a.m. PST (4:30 p.m. UTC) - November 7