2017 StarCraft II World Championship Series

For the first time since the tournament circuit's founding in 2012, the 2017 StarCraft II World Championship Series introduced a format that would stay consistent for two years. Competition was separated into two regions, WCS Circuit and WCS Korea. The former featured four large events with accompanying qualifiers under the WCS Challenger branding, while the latter featured three seasons of the long-running Global StarCraft II League (GSL) Code S with two smaller GSL Super Tournament events interspersed. Two shared World Championship Series Global events featured players from both regions prior to the Global Finals. All these events gave out WCS Circuit and/or WCS Korea points that determined the seeding of the Global Finals.[1] Other events including two of ESL's Intel Extreme Masters and SPOTV's StarCraft II StarLeague also gave out points and were announced at later dates, separately from the main WCS format.[4][5]

Another introduction to the circuit was crowdfunding, as Blizzard Entertainment introduced the War Chest to crowdfund StarCraft II esports, adding $200,000 to the prize pool of the 2017 Global Finals.[6][7]