This was done through the StarCraft II War Chest system, which allowed players to purchase cosmetic items in game with 25% of sales going towards funding the professional scene.

[2] The first year of competition, the 2012 StarCraft II World Championship Series, featured over 30 events including national and continental championships that fed into the grand finals of the year held in Shanghai, China alongside the World of Warcraft finals.

Nationality requirements were removed for the first year of the new league format and though reintroduced in 2014, region-locking remained minimal.

[9] For the first time since the transition to a league format, harsh region-locking restrictions were introduced which lead to the first non-Korean WCS Premier League champion, though some Korean players managed to continue competing by moving to the United States and participating under the new residency requirements.

In 2016, coinciding with the release of StarCraft II's second expansion, Legacy of the Void, the format of the WCS was once again vastly changed.

After 2015s consolidation, the WCS Premier League was completely phased out in favor of regional qualifiers and large weekend tournaments.

Also starting in 2017, crowdfunding was introduced in the form of a War Chest system that allowed players to purchase cosmetic items in-game with 25% of revenue from purchases going to increasing the prize pool of a given event to a point, beyond which money would go to funding competitive play in general.

The first event to have its prize pool increased was the 2017 WCS Global Finals, which received $200,000, the targeted amount, within the first of three stages of the crowdfunding.

Despite the changes in organizer partnerships, the tournament circuit format remained unchanged beyond the inclusion of WCS Winter.