Today, Major League Gaming announced a few changes to the presentation of its upcoming StarCraft II tournament at the MLG National Championships in Providence Nov 18-20th. According to MLG, “Providence is the National Championships, the culmination of the 2011 Season, and nothing short of a blowout will do.”
What changes can you expect? For starters, MLG will now be providing three screens for the StarCraft II main stage. The center screen will be showing the casters point-of-view while the other two screen will show the point-of-view from each player.
Ideally, these screens will be showing the player’s direct POV right from their stations (mouseclicks and all) but we need to test the process on our live event equipment to make sure it works perfectly for both the competitors and the live spectators. If it turns out that we can’t use the player’s POV directly, these screens will be showing the gameplay from the POV of an Observer following each player’s POV.
Unfortunately this change is only for the live venue, well at least until the last three matches. “For those of you watching from home: when we get to the last three matches of the tournament, the two beta streams will stop casting matches from the floor and will stream players’ POVs, as they did in Orlando.”
Another major change for the Nation Championships is the removal of the group stage. In it’s place, the top 16 players (determined by Rank Points) will be placed directly into the championship bracket. There will also be an Open Bracket like the previous MLGs and, like at MLG Orlando, there will be two Beta Streams showing Open Bracket games.
If you tried to get a Competitor Pass for the Open Bracket at Providence but couldn’t because they “sold out in just a few short hours,” don’t sweat it. MLG Announced that it will be releasing more Competitor Passes tomorrow, Friday, October 28, at 7pm ET.
Regardless of whether you watch the games live in Providence or online via the Stream, it sounds like we’re all in for one hell of a show. Hopefully everything goes off without a hitch and MLG Providence turns out the be one of the best eSports event of the year.