We’ve had lots of activity in 2011. We only had to cancel one tournament due to lack of sign-ups, and one of our tournaments had almost 80 participants. Almost every tournament we’ve had a high master player take the victory, and several tournaments we’ve seen the top seeded players and favorites lose to strong newcomers. We’re extremely happy to have so many people participate just for fun and hope even more people will participate in the future!

Our rules and map pool have developed as well, to the degree that any online tournament with a prize pool could probably copy-paste it and use it with a few changes. We’d still like to hear more of your opinions on them, even if it’s just “this is awesome!”, but we certainly haven’t heard any complaints.

We’re going to continue developing the map pool for 2012. To start off we’re going to make sure to include the winners of the IPL and TeamLiquid map making contests. We’ll be eliminating the poor ladder maps and replacing them with GSL or community-made maps. As always, our map additions will always be maps that are used in other tournaments – whether it’s online cups like CraftCup or ESL or high-level tournaments like GSL and IPL. While most players may be more comfortable playing on ladder maps, our goal is to give people experience on these high-level maps and make the tournament more interesting than having the Terran player choose Xel’Naga Caverns as the next map whenever he/she loses.

As for who took the most wins: Vequeth and Raziel both won 3 tournaments, poi, Deranging and snuffekorv won 2 each tournaments and Matiz, Deranging and BobMoo won 1 tournament. Naypam also gets an honorable mention for seeding himself #1 to get a walkover in the finals of one tournament, please feel free to ridicule him in the chat.

What’s in store for next year? More of the same, probably! We’ve got a few ideas that we will work towards realizing, but if we are to manage we’re going to need more man-power. That being said, here are some of the ideas we’re working with:

• League-specific King of the Hill events
• Weekly/monthly KOTH battles where top level players compete in best of 7s
• More swiss-style tournaments
• Educational casts/similar video content

See you in 2012!