On Febuary 27th it was announced that the WCS finals will be held on April 2nd and 3rd in Poitiers at the popular GamersAssembly convention. For many this was welcome news, having StarCraft at a high profile event could help boost the game's popularity and viewership, and perhaps even enable some cross pollination of GamersAssembly goers and StarCraft viewers. Despite these positives there were criticisms of the announcement as well. Chief among these criticisms were the lateness of the schedule's announcement, and the apparent disorganization of ESL leading up to the event.

The surface issues of a late schedule announcement are fairly substantial. Travel and accommodations become more expensive when they are booked on short notice, so increased travel costs are likely to prevent some possible attendees from attending. It is also difficult for other tournaments to to plan their own events around WCS, when no schedule is made public.  These issues hurt growth in the scene, but these are simply the obvious consequences one can glean. To get further insight into some of the consequences of tardiness I spoke with a figure that has been leading the charge on attempting to hold ESL accountable for their disorganization and late schedule. Although the individual wished to remain anonymous he has worked extensively on a prominent foreign langauge stream for WCS.

I begin by asking my subject when he began advocating for the release of the WCS schedule, and what made him think something was amiss. 

Our org releases the schedule and the handbook of our tournament at the begining of our tournaments. It allows viewers to have a decent schedule and tournament organizers to know when they can do other tournaments.

I also wanted to know what consequences he thinks the apparent lateness and disorganization of the scheduling had caused

Well not having a decent schedule is a huge issue for viewers. Viewers do not have a proper schedule which means they are not going to tune in.

For exemple WCS Premier League, group A and B were played Saturday and Sunday, group G and H are going to be played Friday and Saturday. Why? There is no point of changing every 2 weeks days of your broadcast. There is also a weird thing, the tournament starts a 00.00 CET for groups played in USA. Why 00.00 ? It's during a week end, Europeans can watch some but they are not going to watch the whole group. If you start the group at 21.00 CET it does change a lot of things for European viewers and American viewers are good, starting a tournament at 12 AM is not that bad.

Rulebook is also a big issue. Not having a rulebook allows people to make some profit of tricky situations. I asked Blizzard a few things about WCS Handbook and they changed a few things but there are still few things on the WCS Handbook which can allow players to abuse WCS.

I wanted to know if the fact that he had been verbal about these issues had brought him in contact with any pros that had similar concerns, and if he could tell me any of the sentiments they'd expressed to him. 

Some WCS players told me that I was fighting the good fight, some other asked me about the Handbook. I know that I'm useful for pro players but this is not my job to help players and they should ask Blizzard or ESL.

Finally he told me another fact that surprised me, the dates for the WCS finals had been extremely volatile last year and had been changed multiple times on the unofficial schedule before being announnced. 

The tone of this could best be described as frustrated, and somewhat resigned, and it's a feeling that is shared by much of the StarCraft II community. 

It's clear that the interviewee is a passionate fan, but it is also clear that the disorganization of ESL is draining on them. As much as this issue of lateness and disorganization affects fans and viewers, it is also a players' rights issue. With that in mind I spoke to Sam “Kane” Morrissette, the player that appears to be the most affected by the late deployment of the schedule. For those that do not know, Kane had booked a vacation in December which ended up conflicting with the WCS finals, but by the time that the WCS finals schedule was published, the vacation had reached a point where it was no longer refundable.

Sam "Kane" Morrissette photo credit to R1CH

I began by asking Kane if he'd reached out to Blizzard or ESL before booking his vacation. What he had to say was rather unfortunate: 

Nope; I had no idea season one would run this long and I assumed that since they were releasing the schedule so late that they would try to accommodate players or at least ask if certain times would work for them. Terrible assumption to make in retrospect, but there was nothing I could do. Even if I had asked them in December they would've had no idea when it was. Seems like they didn't really know what was going on until a couple weeks ago themselves.

This seemed short-sighted to me so I asked a follow up question; the first qualifier had been run on January 7th, and I wanted to know if announcing the schedule earlier would have been helpful to him at all

Absolutely, I would've had time to adjust my vacation or possibly even get a refund,but once the trip was paid for and everything (end of January I think), there was no opportunity for a refund.

This brought his earlier statement into context. Kane had booked his vacation with the understanding that if the schedule had been released with the qualifiers as most tournaments, he would've been able to adjust his plans.

Finally, I wanted to know what as a player he felt the absolute latest a schedule should be released to players was. His response was the same as Aeromi's: 

I think a full schedule should be released along with the qualifiers so that players know exactly when to book off and what to plan their life around.

Kane also told me that an ESL employee informed him that the finals would in fact take place after his vacation. It's possible that this employee was merely mistaken, but it is also possible that there was still uncertainty about the date and venue of the finals even as recently as last week, mirroring Aeromi's experience with the finals schedule last year.

This kind of incident is harmful to a game's scene in every way, especially when dealing with what is supposed to be the flagship non-Korean event. It hurts viewership, and is disrespectful to players. What we saw in WCS 2015 Season 1 was a failure of organizational skills, planning, and perhaps most importantly, communication. ESL did not respond to request for comment.

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