If you perform well at the Masters Tours, you make it into Grandmasters. There's consistency across all the seasons for the Masters Tours. We've opened that up even more this year, with three relegation spots per season instead of two and double the amount of Masters Tours. You progress from Masters Qualifiers, to Masters Tours and then to Grandmasters. One of the main requests from aspiring players and Grandmasters alike is the implementation of a secondary league, or a stepping stone between pro players and aspiring players.ĭrew: We have an awesome stepping stone in the Masters Tours. With that said, the last five weeks of Grandmasters will be strictly Conquest. As part of that, we're looking to bring back Last Hero Standing (LHS), probably doing Conquest and we might even do a multi-class format where players play in these different environments with a wider set of cards, that maybe you wouldn't see in Conquest. We knew we want to do some swiss tournaments, so there would be a higher statistical base for players to show off their skill. Part of that is being able to adapt and adjust to different styles of play, which can include a different mode, different formats etc. We think the Grandmasters are some of the best players that have ever played Hearthstone and they love showing off their skills. Can you talk a bit about what motivated the team to make this change?ĭrew: When we started Grandmasters in 2019 we heard from the community that they wanted to see additional formats. There are a lot of changes coming to Grandmasters this year, like rotating formats every week including Conquest, Specialist and others. I'm sure the community is going to be really happy to hear that. Are there any active plans to add this functionality in future broadcasts?ĭrew: We've recently announced through Pete Vlastelica (President & CEO at Activision Blizzard Esports) that we're working with Youtube on integrating the ability to do that ( source). One of the questions we've seen the community ask the most is about the pack drops during tournaments. We're looking forward to a great year with them. There's just a lot of cross-pollination there that I think will be very good for the players and the community in general. We're also working on tagging the different players in these VODs, so that when they create their own content we can redirect users to them. There's a lot of times when people can't watch the tournament live and have to rely on VODs, and YouTube's VOD experience is second to none. Many of our biggest and most prolific community members create a lot of content on YouTube and have great traction and viewership.Īlso, this year we also doubled the amount of Masters Tours, which will take place all over the world. I think one of the really cool things about being on YouTube is that there's a very large percentage of our players that watch tons of YouTube content. On January 24th, just a week before Masters Tour Arlington was set to start, Activision Blizzard announced that YouTube would be the exclusive platform for all its live esports event as part of a larger deal between the two companies ( source).Ĭan you talk about how you think this move to YouTube Gaming will benefit Hearthstone esports and the viewer’s experience?ĭrew: I'd love to. Those changes will happen after Season 2 of the Grandmasters competition begins, they said.Tiago Taparelli from the team had a chance to sit down with Drew Higbee, Hearthstone Esports Product Manager for an interview during Masters Tour Arlington.
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