Pro Gaming

[Wolf]

For those that find these things amusing an article for your pleasure:

We're pleased to announce that World of Warcraft will be one of the featured

games in this year's Championship Gaming Series (CGS) World Championship.

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade players on the European and North

American realms have the opportunity to secure a spot in the upcoming CGS

draft, to be held at BlizzCon. Players who are drafted onto CGS teams will

earn $30,000 - $100,000 or more annually in salaries and bonuses as

professional gamers.

Ladders

All teams participating in 2-vs.-2 Arena System matches in each battlegroup

will automatically be entered in the competition. The initial phase of the

tournament will last from June 19 to July 3, and players can check the

rankings by visiting the battlegroup ladder pages. The top five 2-vs.-2

teams in each battlegroup will be invited to the next round.

Qualifiers

Following the end of the ladder phase of the tournament on July 3, the five

top-ranked teams from each battlegroup will be selected to participate in

the qualifiers, as discussed above. Each of these teams will be copied to a

private realm in the corresponding region (Europe and North America), where

they will compete with the other qualifying teams from that region's

battlegroups. The qualifier round will run from July 9 to July 17 and will

utilize the same ranking system as the ladders. At the end of the qualifier

round, the top 8 teams from Europe and North America will be chosen to

participate in the live CGS tournament at BlizzCon and subsequent draft.

BlizzCon Tournament and CGS Draft

The top 16 teams from the qualifiers will be flown to BlizzCon to

participate in a two-day tournament to determine the best 2-vs.-2 Arena

teams in the world. The top 8 teams from Blizzcon will then be flown to the

CGS World Championship in Los Angeles, where they will compete for cash

prizes and immediately begin their careers as salaried pro gamers at CGS.

They will join 1 of 8 CGS teams following the 2008 Draft and then compete

professionally for their teams alongside team members who play a variety of

games, including World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

[Vendes]

wow...just wow...

[Waldonnis]

They have tried something like this recently and ended up disqualifying quite a few teams for account sharing. I'm not even sure they had enough at the end of the disqualifications to even do a reasonable tournament...what I was reading was filled with conflicting information, but even some the teams that weren't fully disqualified had their class balance torn apart from bans and weren't able to compete. I'm curious to see if they're more successful this time around, especially since the stakes look to have been raised.