StarCraft II World Championship Series

The StarCraft II World Championship Series (WCS) was a StarCraft II professional tournament series organized and sanctioned by Blizzard Entertainment that ran from 2012 to 2019. For all but its first year of operation, it was the highest tier of professional StarCraft II competition. Its longest-running iteration featured two regions, World Championship Series Korea and World Championship Series Circuit, with World Championship Series Global events featuring players from both regions. Grand finals were held annually at BlizzCon in Anaheim, California, except for the first year of competition, when the finals were held in Shanghai, China.WCS Circuit events were streamed on Twitch while WCS Korea events were available on Twitch, YouTube, and afreecaTV.

World Championship Series Korea professional competition was centered on events organized by afreecaTV under the Global StarCraft II League (GSL) name, including GSL Code S seasons and GSL Super Tournament events. World Championship Series Circuit professional competition centered on tournaments held under the World Championship Series Circuit name with qualifiers held for each under the World Championship Series Challenger name.

World Championship Global competition featured two large events each year. These were ESL's Intel Extreme Masters World Championship event in Katowice, Poland, and afreecaTV's GSL vs. the World event in Seoul, Korea. For its final two iterations as part of the WCS system, the former has had its prize pool crowdfunded, as did the Global Finals event for its final three iterations. This was done through the StarCraft II War Chest system, which allowed players to purchase cosmetic items in game with 25% of sales going towards funding the professional scene.

Founding (2012)

The StarCraft II World Championship Series was founded alongside a move to share branding among Blizzard Entertainment's competitive games and tournaments under the name Battle.net World Championship Series, which also included World of Warcraft competition.The first year of competition, the 2012 StarCraft II World Championship Series, featured over 30 events including national and continental championships that fed into the grand finals of the year held in Shanghai, China alongside the World of Warcraft finals. Events were limited to a few days or weeks of play with nationality-based limitations. This format lead to the series of events being well-viewed but not considered the peak of StarCraft II competition, especially all events that featured no Koreans and strict nationality requirements for players of the respective nationality or continent.

The shared branding initiative ended as starting with 2013, the respective games' events no longer culminated in the Battle.net World Championship and instead ended under separate names as more Blizzard games came to have their own professional circuits run by the company.

Transition to league format (2013-2014)

Coinciding with the release of StarCraft II's first expansion pack, Heart of the Swarm, the World Championship Series' format was changed drastically to center around Blizzard-run events, turning it into the highest level of professional StarCraft II competition. Starting with the 2013 season, the WCS transitioned to a GSL-inspired league format where seasons would run over multiple weeks and months. These leagues were played under the name WCS Premier League with the lower tier of competition named WCS Challenger, analogous to the GSL's Code S and Code A respectively.Korean StarCraft II leagues upon which this new format was based were included in this transition and came under the WCS banner, with WCS points being given out alongside prize money to define who would qualify for the Global Finals. Nationality requirements were removed for the first year of the new league format and though reintroduced in 2014, region-locking remained minimal. This led to Korean players, historically dominant in professional competition for both the original StarCraft and StarCraft II, winning all leagues across all regions for both years of open league play.2013s WCS featured cross-league seasonal finals, while those were removed for the 2014 season.