I'm not reading too deeply into the "Coming Soon!" blocks. They're less indicative of panic rescheduling than they are of what, in previous years, would just be spots left conspicuously blank for unannounced products. Most of the Q&As (apart from dedicated sessions for WoW) have never been explicitly designated as Q&As.
More to say about the full schedule later, perhaps, but I'll address this first.
The whole StarCraft bracket in a single day? Uh... 😕
This caught my eye too, and seeing the schedule run so late is going to be a nightmare for EU viewership (and in a year where Serral may once again be the big story). That said:
- The round of 16 groups are taking place in the GSL studio in Korea starting this week, so this will be 7 straight matches (four QFs, two SFs, one final).
- Cramming it all in one day is not unprecedented, if you think back to the years when they didn't run the preliminaries off-site, or compare this to the typical schedule of a weekend premier tournament.
- Cramming the usual Saturday rounds into Friday night is new. In some years, the late-night slot in Day 1 would go to a fun showmatch, often in conjunction with a product preview, so what actually surprises me is that there is no pro exhibition of WC3 Reforged anywhere on the schedule like there was for SC Remastered.
- Saturday programming relevant to the StarCraft crowd (The Pylon Show, Carbot) won't be booked against the tournament for once.
- This is partly a question of venue assignment, and I'm glad to see SC2 return to its deserved place in the main Arena now that it isn't booked against Overwatch.
I'm not saying this is a good idea, because the show is going to run extravagantly late, but this is how I'm reading it. As someone who principally follows BlizzCon for the StarCraft WCS, I guess this frees up my Sunday.
