PC Gamer got a chance to interview some key Blizzard personal, and ask them about the newly announced WCS format. They caught up with Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime and Executive VP of Global Publishing, Itzik Ben-Bassat

Mike and Itzik explain the new system in detail, talking about how the decision to change the format came to pass - mostly in order to tell a coherent story, and create a history players can follow:

Mike Morhaime: "The new system accomplishes two things: it creates a single storyline that’s much easier to understand and follow throughout the year, with a global ranking system that makes it simple to track who the top players in the world are. And it allows us to manage scheduling conflicts – we ran into issues last year with a lot of conflicts. This structure allows us to minimize that."

Much of the interview goes into the point system and how Blizzard decided to address each region. Other tournaments not under the WCS banner are also discussed - trying to retain their relevance by awarding points to winners in such events. The decision to partner with ESL in the European region over DreamHack is also touched upon:

Itzik Ben-Bassat: "We informed Dreamhack that we decided to partner with ESL for WCS 2013; it doesn’t mean that Blizzard won’t partner with Dreamhack. We just don’t partner with them for WCS specifically. We still want to see them organizing awesome SC2 tournaments. We’re going to talk with them about awarding [WCS] points to some of their Dreamhack tournaments. The same goes to other tournament organizers."

When asked about the biggest influence, Itzik explains how Blizzard looked at other, more traditional sports, in order to find the correct model. Mike then notes why the company decided to step in with a strong hand, trying to control the scene and divert it in the right direction:

IBB: "So we partnered with some of the biggest people in the market in order to create these leagues. Blizzard is not trying to run offline events or sell advertising. Our model is more similar to the NFL. We keep the brand itself and the top level experience, but we’re partnering with a lot of people who know how to do their job very well in order to bring this experience to players."

MM:"We recognized that we’re in a unique position to make some changes to the top level of pro eSports, and to put a system in place with seven partners in the WCS.

A lot of observers of the StarCraft ecosystem were recognizing there were a few issues: the scheduling conflicts of last year, for example, the complexities of following the storyline is another one. In order to take StarCraft 2 eSports to the next level, we have a responsibility to do something."

The interview ends with a look ahead as both Mike and Itzik speak of the future of eSports and try and think of possibilities such as competing with regular sports in terms of viewership and popularity:

MM: I absolutely do. I think in terms of accessibility, depth, drama and excitement, I think StarCraft has all of those things. Making the storyline simpler and easier to understand, I think it has the potential.

IBB: We were just told the other day that by numbers, StarCraft is bigger than the NHL. If you look just as the last month, we had several live broadcasts, MLG Dallas with record breaking concurrent viewers. Even the Heart of the Swarm release was really successful, with high viewership numbers.

The numbers this year are double the numbers of last year, and we hope to see this trend continuing. If we’re able to double these numbers again next year, we’re getting into very interesting mass market entertainment numbers – especially in the US.

You can check out the interview in it's entirety here: PC Gamer