Winners Of The Road To Blizzcon EU Regionals
Follow the gold brick road
This weekend, Prague was flooded with Blizzard fans for the Road to Blizzcon EU regionals. Players in the Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone and World of WarCraft tournaments competed for a slice of the $300,000 USD prize pool, as well as the chance to play in the World Championships at BlizzCon in November. Pip was at the tournament and will have more in-depth coverage later, but check out the winners below.
The full results for HotS and Hearthstone can be found here, and the WoW tournament here. If you just want the highlights, keep reading.
First up, Heroes of the Storm [official site]. Basically: Na'vi things. They took the tournament without dropping a single game, beating Gamers2 and Dignitas in the semifinal and final respectively. I don't watch HotS, but if this Na'vi plays anything like their Dota counterparts then I'm sure their performance was something to see. They take home a $40,000 cut of the prize.
Onto Hearthstone [official site], where ThijsNL (playing for Gamers2) dominated with an impressive 12-2 performance across the whole tournament, losing only 1 game in the final. He was followed by Neirea in second place and Lifecoach/Ostkaka in 3rd/4th. ThijsNL takes home $10,000 dollars just for him, which thinking about it is even more than the MOBA guys earned by the time that prize money gets split 5 ways. Hearthstone tournaments may not be able to flash around the kind of figures that bigger, team based games can, but boy howdy those people are still earning a lot of money playing video games.
Finally, there's WoW [official site]. The first place spot goes to Reawakened 1 (who finished second in the world championship last year), earning $50,000 between them. Toxic Youth took second place and $20,000. I'll admit to having absolutely no knowledge of competitive WoW, and was only faintly aware it existed. I suppose it's even more unreadable to non-players than other e-sports: the amount of information on screen at any time makes Dota look like child's play (no offense Sumail). Nevertheless, that kind of prize pool is hard to ignore.
The top two teams/players from each game will all advance to the World Championships held at Blizzcon this November.