The 2016 Hearthstone Championship Tour doesnt crown the winner until Nov. 5 at BlizzCon, but that doesnt mean Blizzard isnt already thinking about the next years tour. Blizzard announced several changes to the esports side of Hearthstone on Wednesday morning, focusing on prize pool, new events, scheduling and more.Increased prize poolThe 2016 HCT featured a $1 million total prize pool. For 2017, Blizzard is doubling the pot to $2 million. This will be split into $250,000 pots for each season championship and $1 million total to be distributed at the World Championship.While every professional wants to be thought of as the best of the world, pride cannot be exchanged for goods and service the way money can, and the more Blizzard invests in the prize pool, the more incentives players have to try to get their seats.Hearthstone Global GamesOverwatch wont be the only Blizzard game to get a World Cup-type event. To create a Hearthstone version, Blizzard is putting together the Hearthstone Global Games, a weekly league featuring teams of players representing individual countries.We havent seen a lot of team events in Hearthstone, but one of the best tournaments in Hearthstones existence was the Archon Team League, run throughout the summer of 2015. Hearthstone itself isnt a team game, but the Archon Team League demonstrated that with the proper format -- all classes had to be played and teammates figured out their best matchups -- you can bring a team concept to what is an individual game.Change of seasonal formatBlizzard is doing away with the regional championships for each season and instead going with a regional season playoffs. Now, each of the four Hearthstone regions (Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, China) will hold its own tournament at the end of each season in Swiss format and send the top four to the overall seasonal championship.Im a fan of this idea, simply because by keeping the regions isolated in this way, you cause a bit of Balkanization of the Hearthstone community. Different regions tend to have slightly different metas, especially when the meta is an unstable period after a content release. One example of this was during the Goblins versus Gnomes/Blackrock Mountain era in which the Chinese server had a notably different flavor of Priest decks -- yes, those existed at one point at high ladder ranks -- with Lightbomb adopted before the NA/EU regions started including it.Championship to be aligned with StandardOne first is that the next championship wont take place at BlizzCon, but in early 2018 at the end of the upcoming, as-yet-untitled Standard year (we are currently in the Year of the Kraken). The main reason for this is Blizzard wishes to align its content releases with the seasonal championships and the overall Standard year with one full championship tour.Blizzard wants to match the HCT calendar with new content such that each season is based on the same card pool all the way through. Doing it this way eliminates a significant inconsistency in some of the tournaments. For example, this year, the summer preliminaries came the same month as the One Night in Karazhan adventure, resulting in a weird situation where the card pool was different each week as new cards were implemented.More even distribution of both points and prizesA significant reality of Hearthstone compared to other esports is that theres always going to be a great deal more RNG (random number generation) than in a MOBA like League of Legends or an FPS like Counter-Strike. Its a high-variance esport like poker, and as such, a more level distribution of awards seems to be necessary for a healthy competitive scene. Tournament formats in which the competitors play 1,000 games to get healthy sample sizes to differentiate ability are impractical, so the next-best thing is to even out these awards. This rewards consistent players and encourages pros to stick with Hearthstone rather than have to chase high-risk, high-reward payouts.The exact distribution of points and jackpots has not been released, but Blizzards plan is to distribute both Hearthstone Competitive Points earned from tournaments and ranked play more evenly, starting with the November Ranked Play season. The same deal goes for Blizzard-run tournament jackpots. This will help prevent a situation like this years in which many of the Hearthstone pros found themselves so far behind in points that they were simply throwing in the towel by late summer.Hearthstone Inn-vitationalsId like to complain about the pun, but Ive made some quite awful ones myself, so I probably shouldnt throw any stones here. Blizzard is again taking a page from a successful alternative kind of tournament, the best examples in this case being the SeatStory cups or the Challengestones. The idea of an Inn-vitational is to create a fun, looser type of tournament for people to watch, with popular streamers, tournament winners and celebrities.Top streamers and players like Octavian Kripparrian Morosan, Jeffrey Trump Shih, Kacem Noxious Khilaji and Brian Kibler are important to the Hearthstone viewing audience, and its not because they win tourney after tourney. The idea here is to play with tournament formats and introduce personalities as well, to bring some variety to a game that sometimes needs it. Nike Air Max Plus For Sale . Duchene scored two goals and had an assist, helping the Colorado Avalanche beat the Carolina Hurricanes 4-2 on Friday night to match the best 10-game start in team history. Discount Nike Air Max Plus . For the Wild it was their first win of the season and they now have a record of 1-1-2 while the Jets fall to 2-2. 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TORONTO -- Some time ago, I likened Team USAs chances at the World Cup of Hockey to a grand experiment.Because GM Dean Lombardi and his management team purposefully eschewed more talented players in the hopes of building an American team that could quickly become more than the sum of its parts, there was great anticipation about how the experiment would play out in Toronto.Well sum it up in one word: Kaboom.Two days after the U.S. was whipped 4-2 by Canada, which effectively ended its tournament just two games in, the dust is still settling around Team USA from the rafters. How long the reverberations from the disaster in Toronto will last -- well, thats a different matter altogether.Lombardi addressed the issues about how his team was built and why it failed so miserably at the World Cup for the first time on Thursday. Like Team USA head coach John Tortorella, he defended the roster construction.Fair enough. The razor-thin edge that Lombardi has always walked along with the?Los Angeles Kings?has been his devotion to his players. That kind of unwavering belief has earned him two Stanley Cup championships -- as well as contracts that will haunt him for years, and perhaps making winning more championships impossible.The reason we won [was because] we were a frickin team and that was a culture, Lombardi said of his Kings.Building a team for an NHL season is a different beast than building one to play in a brutally short tournament such as the World Cup, and in the end those differences werent fully recognized. Or if they were recognized, they were essentially ignored.Lombardi was predictably defiant in his support of his World Cup players.There were guys with tears in their eyes the other night and they were real, Lombardi said. I will always remember that. Some of the texts I got from players yesterday, I will treasure them the rest of my life. That is good stuff. Those are things you dont forget, even in failure. That part we got down. I told them I wish I had this group for a longer period of time, because I know we could have built that culture. But it didnt happen.The uncomfortable truth is that either heart -- which was which the key building block for this team -- cant trump skill or, worse, that Team USA simply didnt collectively possess the heart Lombardi or anyone else thought it did.When the Americans came out flat against Team Europe and lost 3-0 in a game they had to win to set themselves up for a trip to the tournament semifinals, it turned out that the lightly regarded Europeans showed greater heart.Lombardi bristled at the notion that somehow Team Europe, basically the hockey equivalent of a lean-to made out of branches and old string, with players pulled together from eight different countries, found a winning culture in a matter of days while Team USA, which included 14 members of the Sochi Olympic squad and nine members of the U.S. team that won a silver medal in 2010 in Vancouver, could not.But thats exactly what happened.So Team Europe will play against Sweden iin the semifinals Sunday afternoon (1 ET, ESPN) while Team USA is headed home after a meaningless third preliminary-round game against the Czech Republic on Thursday night, with the echoes of sharp criticism from the media and needling from former players such as?Phil Kessel,?who was left off the World Cup roster, still ringing in their ears.ddddddddddddLombardi did admit that Team USA either didnt understand or properly respond to the urgency required to overcome a European team that was considered among the weakest of the eight teams in the World Cup field.Lombardi has seen his Kings team rally from a 3-0 series deficit to win a playoff series. Thats the proverbial 8-ball, Lombardi said.When Team USA lost to Europe? This felt like a boulder, Lombardi said. It was just really strange. Like, how can this happen so quickly, where your back is against the wall after one poor game?Lombardi suggested it was almost as though the team cared too much and became paralyzed by it.Isnt having heart the opposite of that?Isnt having heart rising above those kinds of setbacks, of pushing aside the disappointment to find success?If that is so, where was it?Few people in the game are as detail-oriented as Lombardi who built those two Stanley Cup winners as GM of the Kings and wanted desperately to pay homage to past U.S. hockey glory by building a winner here.He believed that in order to do that he needed a team that could compete with Canada. He believed that, lacking the skill that Canada possesses, his U.S. squad could balance the equation by adding more heart and character.Tortorella was brutally frank about the disparity between the two hockey neighbors.Ill be honest: were not as deep as Canada, skillwise, Tortorella said. Not sure USA Hockey will like me saying that, but its the truth. Its a situation where I still think, in our mind, we could not just skill our way through Canada.The problem with the theory is that it suggests that skill and heart -- or grit -- are mutually exclusive. For Canada, skill and heart are mutually inclusive. It can be so for the Americans as well, as it was 20 years ago when the U.S. beat Canada at the inaugural World Cup of Hockey in 1996.By the time the next best-on-best tournament rolls around, maybe it will be so again.Maybe Auston Matthews, Johnny Gaudreau, Jack Eichel, Shayne Gostisbehere, Vincent Trocheck and all the other shiny young Americans who have made Team North America the darlings of the World Cup will allow the U.S. team builders to rethink the formula for success at these kinds of tournaments -- or to simply bring their best players because they will represent the same kind of balance that Canada has enjoyed for an entire generation.Who knows, maybe the memory of this experiment gone so horribly wrong in Toronto will become a historic turning point for American hockey.An explosion that cleared land for a new future. ' ' '
