The 2016 Hearthstone Championship Tour doesn't crown the winner until Nov. 5 at BlizzCon, but that doesn't mean Blizzard isn't already thinking about the next year's tour. Blizzard announced several changes to the esports side of Hearthstone on Wednesday morning, focusing on prize pool, new events, scheduling and more.
Increased prize pool
The 2016 HCT featured a $1 million total prize pool. For 2017, Blizzard is doubling the pot to $2 million. This will be split into $250,000 pots for each season championship and $1 million total to be distributed at the World Championship.
While every professional wants to be thought of as the best of the world, pride cannot be exchanged for goods and service the way money can, and the more Blizzard invests in the prize pool, the more incentives players have to try to get their seats.
Hearthstone Global Games
Overwatch won't be the only Blizzard game to get a World Cup-type event. To create a Hearthstone version, Blizzard is putting together the Hearthstone Global Games, a weekly league featuring teams of players representing individual countries.
We haven't seen a lot of team events in Hearthstone, but one of the best tournaments in Hearthstone's existence was the Archon Team League, run throughout the summer of 2015. Hearthstone itself isn't a team game, but the Archon Team League demonstrated that with the proper format -- all classes had to be played and teammates figured out their best matchups -- you can bring a team concept to what is an individual game.
Change of seasonal format
Blizzard is doing away with the regional championships for each season and instead going with a regional season playoffs. Now, each of the four Hearthstone regions (Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, China) will hold its own tournament at the end of each season in Swiss format and send the top four to the overall seasonal championship.
I'm a fan of this idea, simply because by keeping the regions isolated in this way, you cause a bit of Balkanization of the Hearthstone community. Different regions tend to have slightly different metas, especially when the meta is an unstable period after a content release. One example of this was during the Goblins versus Gnomes/Blackrock Mountain era in which the Chinese server had a notably different flavor of Priest decks -- yes, those existed at one point at high ladder ranks -- with Lightbomb adopted before the NA/EU regions started including it.
Championship to be aligned with Standard
One first is that the next championship won't take place at BlizzCon, but in early 2018 at the end of the upcoming, as-yet-untitled Standard year (we are currently in the Year of the Kraken). The main reason for this is Blizzard wishes to align its content releases with the seasonal championships and the overall Standard year with one full championship tour.
Blizzard wants to match the HCT calendar with new content such that each season is based on the same card pool all the way through. Doing it this way eliminates a significant inconsistency in some of the tournaments. For example, this year, the summer preliminaries came the same month as the One Night in Karazhan adventure, resulting in a weird situation where the card pool was different each week as new cards were implemented.
More even distribution of both points and prizes
A significant reality of Hearthstone compared to other esports is that there's always going to be a great deal more RNG (random number generation) than in a MOBA like League of Legends or an FPS like Counter-Strike. It's a high-variance esport like poker, and as such, a more level distribution of awards seems to be necessary for a healthy competitive scene. Tournament formats in which the competitors play 1,000 games to get healthy sample sizes to differentiate ability are impractical, so the next-best thing is to even out these awards. This rewards consistent players and encourages pros to stick with Hearthstone rather than have to chase high-risk, high-reward payouts.
The exact distribution of points and jackpots has not been released, but Blizzard's plan is to distribute both Hearthstone Competitive Points earned from tournaments and ranked play more evenly, starting with the November Ranked Play season. The same deal goes for Blizzard-run tournament jackpots. This will help prevent a situation like this year's in which many of the Hearthstone pros found themselves so far behind in points that they were simply throwing in the towel by late summer.
Hearthstone Inn-vitationals
I'd like to complain about the pun, but I've made some quite awful ones myself, so I probably shouldn't throw any stones here. Blizzard is again taking a page from a successful alternative kind of tournament, the best examples in this case being the SeatStory cups or the Challengestones. The idea of an Inn-vitational is to create a fun, looser type of tournament for people to watch, with popular streamers, tournament winners and celebrities.
Top streamers and players like Octavian "Kripparrian" Morosan, Jeffrey "Trump" Shih, Kacem "Noxious" Khilaji and Brian Kibler are important to the Hearthstone viewing audience, and it's not because they win tourney after tourney. The idea here is to play with tournament formats and introduce personalities as well, to bring some variety to a game that sometimes needs it.