Today, Major League Gaming announced a few changes to the presentation of its upcoming StarCraft II tournament at the MLG National Championships in Providence Nov 18-20th. According to MLG, “Providence is the National Championships, the culmination of the 2011 Season, and nothing short of a blowout will do.”

What changes can you expect? For starters, MLG will now be providing three screens for the StarCraft II main stage. The center screen will be showing the casters point-of-view while the other two screen will show the point-of-view from each player.

Ideally, these screens will be showing the player’s direct POV right from their stations (mouseclicks and all) but we need to test the process on our live event equipment to make sure it works perfectly for both the competitors and the live spectators. If it turns out that we can’t use the player’s POV directly, these screens will be showing the gameplay from the POV of an Observer following each player’s POV.

Unfortunately this change is only for the live venue, well at least until the last three matches. “For those of you watching from home: when we get to the last three matches of the tournament, the two beta streams will stop casting matches from the floor and will stream players’ POVs, as they did in Orlando.”

Another major change for the Nation Championships is the removal of the group stage. In it’s place, the top 16 players (determined by Rank Points) will be placed directly into the championship bracket. There will also be an Open Bracket like the previous MLGs and, like at MLG Orlando, there will be two Beta Streams showing Open Bracket games.

If you tried to get a Competitor Pass for the Open Bracket at Providence but couldn’t because they “sold out in just a few short hours,” don’t sweat it. MLG Announced that it will be releasing more Competitor Passes tomorrow, Friday, October 28, at 7pm ET.

Regardless of whether you watch the games live in Providence or online via the Stream, it sounds like we’re all in for one hell of a show. Hopefully everything goes off without a hitch and MLG Providence turns out the be one of the best eSports event of the year.

Today marked the start of Season 4 of the StarCraft II Ladder. While previous Seasons started out with a new patch or some balance changes, Season 4 arrived with relatively few changes. Basically the only change, aside from the ladder resetting, is the map pool. Three of the least popular map Typhon peaks, Backwater Gulch, and Searing Crater have been cut from the map pool. In their place Blizzard has brought back the old favorite Metalopolis, this time with close spawns removed. The popular map Shattered Temple has also had close spawns removed.

For those of you who may not have been around when the last ladder season came to a close, let me walk you though the process as it can be a tad bit confusing to new blood. Basically you’ll be required to play one more placement match like the ones you were forced to play when you first created your account. You’ll see people posting on sites like reddit.com/r/starcraft or teamliquid.net that they’ve been either promoted or demoted a league after their new placement match. Don’t worry too much about this, it’s based on your MMR from the last season. These players would have normally been promoted or demoted had the ladder not be locked for the last few weeks. Other than the placement match, there really isn’t much else to the new season.

Now that the new season is here, what do you guys think about the removal of Typhon peaks, Backwater Gulch, and Searing Crater? What about the re-adding of Metalopolis? Personally I think it’s a good move by Blizzard. Now you can thumbs down Abyssal Caverns and Nerazim Crypt and only play maps that are in major tournaments. Let us know what you think about these changes by leaving a comment below.

In the weeks leading up to Blizzcon, Blizzard Entertainment teased StarCraft II fans by releasing silhouettes of the new units that will be added in the first expansion Heart of the Swarm. Now that Blizzcon has officially kicked off, its time to finally see what’s being added to the Terran, Protoss and Zerg arsenals.

As you can see from the images above it looks like there’s going to be some real game changers. On top of these new units, Blizzard has also removed several units from the game (at least in the current build of HotS). For Protoss, both the Carrier and the Mothership have been taken out of the game, while Zerg is losing the Overseer. Other important changes include new Nexus abilities; Arc-shild which grants an “anti-light weapon” to and structure and Mass Recall which was formerly a Mothership spell. Apparently Blizzard has also increased the Hydralisk move speed, Banlings can more while Burrowed (potentially an upgrade like Roach Burrow Movement), and Ultralisks now have a Burrow Charge ability. Terran is also getting some pretty major changes. Thors are now 600 minerals, require a Fusion Core, no longer hit air but have the ground area of effect attack from the single-player. Also you can only have one Thor at a time. Reapers have lost their D8 charge attack but gain a new HP recovery skill. Lastly Ghosts Cloaking has changed, it now spends a specific amount of energy and lasting for a certain period of time as oppose to the on/off system in place now.

It will be interesting to see how the pro scene and the metagame shift with the changes Blizzard has made. Hopefully there will be a public beta released sometime soon so we can get some hands on time and see how major these changes are.

What do you guys think about these new units? Which one is your favorite? What about you least favorite? Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.

Today Major League Gaming released the viewer count for last weekend’s MLG Orlando event, and I must say it’s pretty impressive. On top of the 15,000 fan who attended in person, there were 181,000 “unique concurrent online viewers” who watched live stream online. This broke the previous record of 138,000 concurrent viewers set by MLG Raleigh by 43,000 viewers.

Sundance DiGiovanni, CEO of Major League Gaming stated: “The record-breaking viewership of our live broadcasts this year is truly elevating the global presence of eSports, placing MLG viewing in the same ballpark as traditional TV viewing numbers. The support of our community is undeniable and fans can expect more high-quality streaming, intense matchups and 2012 season announcements during our 2011 Pro Circuit Championship live from Providence, Rhode Island on November 18-20.”

What I find so impressive about these numbers is that every MLG event absolutely crushes the previous one in terms of viewer count. This type of growth is just what eSports needs to help it become more mainstream. One only assume that the 2011 Pro Circuit Championship at Providence, Rhode Island will continue to show the same type of viewer growth. To help make this prediction a reality, help spread the word about MLG and eSports by telling your friends and posting on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. If we all pitch in, hopefully we will be able to look at 2011 as the year that eSports took over the West.