After recent tournaments moved to an online format, the community expected Blizzard to have an announcement as well about the future of its PvP and PvE scene.
Blizzard finally shed some light on the situation regarding the PvP scene in a developer update today: WoW’s 2020 Arena World Championship will be moving entirely to an online format.
The plan was to have a multi-region LAN tournament by the summer after the regional cups. But one key obstacle for this to come to fruition is the differences in regional server ping.
As a result, to preserve the competitive integrity of the tournament, Blizzard will make changes to its original schedule tournaments.
The new tournament will consist of three stages: the AWC Cups, the AWC Circuit and the Finals.
AWC Cups
Eight online open-to-everyone tournaments will take place from May 22 through June 14, with a prize pool of $10,000 USD each. The winner in the tournaments will earn AWC points, which will help them qualify for the eight spots in the AWC Circuit.
AWC Circuit
The top eight teams based by AWC points will be invited to compete in a round-robin tournament for their respective region, with a guaranteed prize for qualifying and participating. Each team will play against every other team once in a best-of-five series, awarding one point to each winning team. These matches will be played over four weekends with the dates yet to be determined by Blizzard.
Finals
The top four teams from each region will be seeded into two double-elimination groups, where they will battle through the final weekend of the AWC Battle for Azeroth Season. Only two teams will come out on top, each in their respective region to be crowned the regional champions of Battle for Azeroth and earning the lion’s share of the prize pool.
Prize pool
While the original goal was to have the LAN tournament have a share of $500,000 USD, the circumstances have affected the distribution of the prize pool as well. The $500,000 USD is split into $250,000 USD for each region, with the Circuit granting $150,000 USD split to teams that qualified based on ranking at the end of the Circuit and the Finals granting $100,000 USD. The exact split of the prize pool will be revealed as the tournament period gets closer.
Blizzard has been going all-out lately with its communication and announcements. Last week they have released the Shadowlands Alpha to a selected amount of individuals to test it out and provide feedback. On top of that, the company has provided a lot of insight behind the systems coming in Shadowlands.
One notable change that has received a lot of positive feedback is the return to the old Conquest Point systems for PvP, which will allow players to obtain the gear they want faster without relying on loot boxes.
Published: Apr 15, 2020 03:19 pm