Thoughts on the new IEM with StarCraft II
In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve announced the new season of the Intel Extreme Masters. And with it, some significant changes to how our StarCraft II tournaments are going to run.
For those of you unaware of the changes, here’s a quick rundown:
IEM stops will have 24 players: 16 will qualify online and 8 will come from an open tournament on Day 1.
We are very proud of the fact that you need to qualify for every Intel Extreme Masters tournament and that we don’t do invitations. We’ve given a chance to great many players and some of them have made a mark in StarCraft II (Feast went through five qualifiers to get to our Kiev event and went on to take 4th place at our World Championship event).
This philosophy of ours got a lot of people complaining about the lineup of players attending our events. I find those complaints offensive to the players that won spots at our events.