BlizzCon StarCraft Map Contest Results
The five winning StarCraft maps that will be used in the BlizzCon Invitational have been chosen! We received hundreds of great entries, and the process of judging the winners was certainly not easy. In October, the StarCraft community's eyes will be on the talented players flown in from across the globe competing on these maps.

The Judging Process
How does one go about sorting through huge numbers of maps to find a small handful most suitable for professional StarCraft play? A small internal team started by removing the maps that didn't comply with the rules, maps that had glaring balance problems even at first glance, and some that looked like fun to play on Battle.net, but not in a serious competition.

After several rounds of this vetting, the team had greatly reduced the number of entries still under consideration down to 45 maps. We then turned to a team of five judges to complete the remainder of the selection process. Each of the judges was presented all the maps and instructed to rate the maps in three tiers of quality. A judge placing the map into the upper tier was worth 2 points, the middle tier 1 point, and the lowest tier no points.

The Judges
We selected a team of judges representing different parts of the world and different parts of the StarCraft community. They were:

• Matt Morris - Senior Level Designer at Blizzard Entertainment
• Peter "Legionnaire" Neate - recently retired professional gamer from Australia
• Taylor "Mora" Fales - Canadian author of two Blizzard Mystery-Map Invitational maps including Coullee
• Tom "FroZ" Whittier - past United States representative at World Cyber Games
• Seong "Enough" Jun-Mo - former Korean professional gamer and staff at FighterForum.com

The Maps

	Signal By: trcc Tileset: Twilight Size: 128x128 Players: 2
	"Signal looks even in most aspects." - Peter

	King of the Abyss By: Travin Tileset: Ice Size: 128x128 Players: 2
	"The starting positions are seperated by a mineral wall, which offers a possible point of focus and major role in the map. The bases being so close together - on an island map at that - makes for a very fast paced game, most likely having lots of action right from the beginning." - Taylor

	Crusader By: Travin Tileset: Jungle Size: 128x128 Players: 4
	"Positionally balanced very well, a straight-up map but well made." - Taylor

	Nightlight By: Boongee Tileset: Twilight Size: 128x128 Players: 2
	"Good balancing between the three races. Lots of possibilities for strategy and attacks." - Jun-Mo

	Roads to Antiga Prime By: Snooky Tileset: Badlands Size: 96x128 Players: 2
	"All the expansions are open to attack making the decision when to expand a vital piece of strategy. Great Map!" - Matt

All of the BlizzCon Invitational maps can be downloaded here.