A List of Warcraft Leagues
A major portion of the replays that are uploaded on well known warcraft sites (WCReplays, Replays.net etc) are produced by top level league games such as the WC3L or NGL. There is no doubt that these two leagues are the top most in every aspect… be it prize money, skill level, organisation or the fact that both have offline finals every season. However, there is a lot more activity in the warcraft scene and many of us are not aware of it.
Here is a list along with a small description of other not so well known European and American leagues. I’ll try my best to order them in decreasing skill order as accurately as possible.
1. WPL - ‘Warcraft Premier League’
WPL is a branch of ‘The Gaming League’ (TGL) with well known teams such as PGS, wicked, srs and fnatic that take part in it. I would rate it above NGL-two even.
2. WCIP - ‘Wc3 International Premiership’
The WCIP is organised by ‘Electronic Sports League’ (which also organises WC3L) and is highly rated among all the semi-pro leagues.
3. WGS - ‘World Gaming Series’
The WGS is responsible for organising two warcraft leagues, namely ‘The Frozen League’ (TFL) and ‘World Gaming League’ (WGL). TFL works on the WC3L format (five independent games) whereas the WGL is NGL format (winner to stay). These two leagues are almost as good as WCIP, if not better.
4. WHL - ‘Warcraft Heroes League’
WHL is only into its third season and has improved massively since when it started. Many top american teams and some decent european teams participate in this league.
WCL has been around for a while now. The organisers faced some problems recently and there were some chances of it being closed down, but thankfully it’s still running, currently having qualifiers for their next season.
Other respectable leagues that fall at the bottom of this list include:
7. W3AL - ‘Warcraft III Americas League’
8. ICL/ICE - ‘Infernal Cry League’
I’ve been following these leagues a lot more than i used to. While the skill level is definitely not what one might be used to seeing in golden crowned replays from replays.net, this level of gaming also helps us improve. The reason being that these players make mistakes that pros only rarely would, from which we could learn.
Replays from these leagues can be found on their websites.
Now this a very good post Rafey if I had any interest left in following WC3 scene. It’s actually a bit sad that we have no WC3 community (not even a small one) left in Pakistan. The usual response is that most warcraft players were shifting to dota. But there is this other, perhaps an even more important, aspect to this dilemma too. We all realized (particularly after WCG 2005) that we needed good online play. But good net came far too late when most of the wc3 players just got tired of the game. If we had seen good net and low lag online play couple of years earlier the community would not have died imo.
May 3rd, 2008 at 8:55 am
Rafey, hats off to you man.
Dean, I kinda agree with you on how this internet was not there when we had a bigger community in the non-DoTA area. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still fire up WC3 for that 1v1 ladder match.
There is a big community of WC3 players online and world wide. I am sure they will find this post highly relevant to them.
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:13 pm
The internet we have right now is almost the same as it used to be as far as latency goes (it’s only a bit less expensive). Problem is that back in those days GGC wasn’t public.
But believe me, even if it had been, the size of the wc3 community here in Pakistan wouldn’t be much different. The point im implying is that lack of lagless online gaming isn’t the reason why there are so few players left, it’s just the nature of warcraft itself (too time consuming, single-player etc).
Apart from that, its natural for people to quit or shift to another game. Do you think most of the old players would have been around if we could play online with good pings 4 yrs ago? Some of them might not have quit, but the rest would have anyways. A good example would be that of the USA. Those guys can play on fairly good ping, yet most people have shifted to DotA/WoW. Sure they have a lot more players than Pakistan does, but that’s just because a larger chunk of their population have access to wc3.
May 4th, 2008 at 2:05 am
I think every game that needs to be fair to everyone who plays it to be good needs to be a little hard to master. It took me a whole 4 years to get some of the basic concepts right, but I thoroughly enjoyed the game over the years.
As for the gaming community, I believe the community is much more mature today than it was back in the days. Talking about Counter Strike and DotA, our gamers are readily playing clanwars and readily engaging in international matches.
4 years ago, we were limited by the internet (may be pricing or lag) to play good players online. We would engage in skirms between ourselves and watch replays. Our level didn’t get any better than the best player around.
I hope the community shows more maturity and we together get the ISPs to improve their global ping issues. Including local ping issue that are such a brainf***. I hope we engage more and more international players and get our level up to international level.
More local tournies will help this case too and let me take this opportunity to let you guys know that I am playing something about a LAN soon enough. Wish me luck.
May 4th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
What LAN are you talking about :O
May 4th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
I with the help of a few friends will try to get something going when I return to Islamabad.
May 5th, 2008 at 3:06 pm