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Good gods: Smite World Championship to offer more than $600,000 in prizes

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Smite, the MOBA that has you fight other players as ancient gods, has announced that its first World Championship will take place in Atlanta Georgia between 9 – 11 January, 2015. Hi-Rez’s MOBA may be relatively new to the scene, officially launching in March this year and getting a great score in our Smite review, but it’s not wasting time with a small event: Hi-Rez and its publisher Tencent are ponying up $600,000 in prize money.

We spoke to Todd Harris, Hi-Rez’s COO, about the upcoming tournament.

While the current prize pot stands at $600,000 the final amount could be significantly larger, Harris explained. “We’ll definitely offer some in-game items that contribute to the prize pool. We did that for our Launch tournament last March and were able to raise an additional $100,000.”

There will also ways to support individual teams, too. “We already have profile badges for the teams that participated in our Launch Tournament and we plan to add more for teams participating in the World Tournament.”

The World Tournament’s already been in the works for months, ever since the Smite Launch Tournament in March. “The first challenge was finding a larger suitable venue and we were fortunate to book the Cobb Energy Center.

“The next challenge was setting up a qualification structure that was fair to existing teams but also supported a way for talented new teams to qualify. Our e-sports team has been working hard to define that new structure of a Challenger Cup in addition to the Pro League.”

Even if you’ve not started playing Smite then there’s still routes open to qualify for the World Tournament, Harris explains. “If you are a new team in North America or Europe, you get started by going to esports.smitegame.com and signing up for the weekend online tournaments. A less experienced team would likely participate in the Challenger Cup rather than the Pro League series but each provides a path to the World Tournament.

“NA teams play on Saturdays and EU teams play on Sundays. These online tournaments earn your team points toward various LAN invitational events as well as the World Tournament.

“Latin America and China have their own qualification process but then in early January the top teams per region are invited to Atlanta for the multi-day World Tournament.”

The winners stand to make a pile of cash as they’re awarded 50% of the final prize pot. Second place do well out of it to, getting 25%. Hi-Rez are still working out the rest of the pool but that should be enough of incentive to get you going.

Fraser took a dive into Smite when it first launched and came out a staunch supporter of the young MOBA.