The first event will feature a team of players from Europe battling against a team from the Americas. The second event will match the winner of the first against a team of players from Asia. Each event consists of five best-of-three matches, with each mystery map being played once. The team that wins three or more matches will be declared winner. All matches and maps will be played out regardless of the results from earlier games and matches.

Saturday, December 11 at 11 a.m. PDT on the Europe Battle.net gateway.

The three maps for the first event will only be released a short time before the event takes place. This means players won't be on familiar ground and will have to adapt their strategies to new maps. Three new maps will be created for the second event. Like the first event, they will only be released shortly beforehand.

While in the future we may host some larger-scale StarCraft events, time constraints led us to invite a select number of players. Some difficult decisions had to be made considering the large pool of talented StarCraft players worldwide who all would've done a great job representing their regions. After extensive discussion with several e-sport pundits, we invited players based on several criteria. These included their recent form, past accomplishments, and fan familiarity.

A forum thread will be created on the Battle.net StarCraft forums inviting fans to voice their opinions about which player match-ups they'd like to see. This thread will have the most weight in the decision.

We anticipate the second event will take place sometime in January. There will be little or no changes in the format from the first. The same players will be invited to participate. However, if any of the players are unavailable for the competition, we'll be inviting replacements. Additionally, if any players violated the rules in the first event, they will be barred from playing again.

Results, replays, and audio commentaries will be posted after the matches have been played. Unfortunately, we will not be allowing any observers to join the games.

All members of the winning team, including the captains, will be awarded a package of cool StarCraft prizes. You can see the full list on the prizes page.

Games will be played with Fastest speed on Use Map Settings.

Peon-unit stacking attacks, observers over towers, allied mines, Terran building crushes of interceptors, and floating unit bug exploits are not permitted. Also any use of hacks, cheats, or 3rd party programs will result in an automatic disqualification.

In almost all cases, a disconnect or extreme lag will result in that map being forfeited by the disconnected or badly lagging player. However, if a disconnect or unplayable lag occurs in the first 30 seconds of the game, the game will be restarted. In the event of a unpowered pylon bug, the player should screenshot the situation and await a ruling from the event host.

With an odd number of teams competing in these events, we chose a schedule where one team would play the winner of the first event in order to determine the champion. Our decision was made on the basis of Asia's historically strong performances in past Brood War competitions.

The match-ups were decided based on three inputs: the preferred match-ups of the two team captains and the tabulated results of the thread on the Battle.net StarCraft forums, where the community was asked to vote for their desired match-ups.

A Match-Up Value Unit (MVU) was then applied to each of these three inputs. The captains' lists were worth 1 MVU per game, and the forum votes were worth 1.25 MVU per game. Each match-up the captains asked for had a 1 MVU value inserted into a table. For each player's possible opponents, the forum votes were calculated as a percentage. If 30% of votes wanted player A's opponent to be player X, a 0.375 MVU was added to that potential match-up (30% x 1.25).

Once all the MVU values were determined for each match-up, each possible combination of five match-ups was tabulated to determine which had the highest aggregate MVU. This highest-scoring combination of the five matches most closely mirrored the combined preferences of the community and the two team captains, and was thus chosen for the event.

It should be noted that the highest scoring MVU set-of-five doesn't always include the highest single MVU match-up, and in the case of this event it did not. The highest was Testie vs. Mondragon which had a 1.64 MVU ((1 captain vote = 1 MVU) + (51% of votes * 1.25) = 1.64 MVU). However, with Testie playing Mondragon, the best-case combined MVU of the other four match-ups resulted in a lower total, including one 0.14 MVU match-up being played (meaning neither captain and only about 11% of forum voters wanted to see it). That meant that if we let Testie play Mondragon, the other possible match-up combinations would have been ones that people actually didn't prefer as much. So in order to provide the most popular match-ups for the entire set, as opposed to just the single most popular match-up, we had to make sure all the match-ups were high-scoring, which happened to result in the second-highest match-ups for both Testie and Mondragon. In this case, that meant Testie would play Trek and Mondragon would play Hero.