Eastern cast fully assembled for WPC-ACE; Prize pool increased

The cast for WPC-ACE's twelve-team eastern division is complete, and it is comprised of six invited Chinese teams, two invited SEA teams and four Chinese-qualifier winners. These teams will take part in a group stage, with the eventual top six joining two western teams on the playoffs. Meanwhile, American team Cloud9 has confirmed participation on the western tournament.

While six Chinese teams were directly invited last week, a number of local non-invited teams went through the qualifiers the three past days. Four teams advanced from the qualifiers, which includes the relatively-new team in NewBee and the rising teams in CIS and DT. Joining them are the two invited Southeast-Asian teams in Titan and Orange. The complete list of teams is:
 

• DK
• Invictus Gaming
• LGD
• HGT
• Vici Gaming
• Tongfu.WanZhouu
• DreamTime
• NewBee
• CIS
• Orenda
• Titan
• Orange
   

The group stage will start on 29 March at the Shanghai ESports Centre. It will be played on a LAN environment, and thus even the two Malaysian teams will have to fly to China to compete. The top six teams after the group stage will advance into the playoffs.

There will also be a western tournament, where Alliance and three other teams will be competing. The other teams are still unconfirmed as of now, but we are told that they are expecting 'top-tier teams'. Given that, candidates based on past performances are teams like Natus Vincere, Empire and Cloud 9. the Out of the four teams in the western tournament, the top two will be qualifying and flying over to China for the playoffs.

WPC-ACE so far holds the prestige as the tournament with the highest prize pool from a third-party organizer. It had a $220,000 prize pool last year, of which a big portion went to eventual champion DK. Team DK won the $163,000 first prize purse after narrrowly edging Invictus Gaming on the best-of-seven finals with the score of 4-3.

UPDATE

GosuGamers has gotten word on the prize pool for this year's WPC-ACE tournament. It will be $245,000~ (1.53M RMB), an increase from last year's. The prize for the champion is similar, but now the teams finishing from fifth to eight will still be receiving around $3,200 (20,000 RMB).

Source: WPC-QQ