The 12th Season of the StarLadder StarSeries will see a revised format take place, as smaller groups will replace the large round-robin divisions. More importantly however, the LAN finals will not be in Kiev, but in Bucharest.
StarLadder has announced its 12th season and a new format will replace the old round-robin groupstage. An initial groupstage of multiple groups will now take place for all four regions, with four teams per group playing out a bo3 round-robin. This means, that Europe will see four groups play out, with NA, SEA and China each having two groups. The best two teams of each group will advance and to the next stage. For the European division that means another group stage with two groups while for the other regions, it will be a double elimination bracket with four teams each. Thus, the number of total teams participating for each region remains almost the same, with Europe fielding 16 teams, while every other region fields eight teams each.

The Chinese groups will announced later. Every group will be played seperately over the course of three days.
The most important change to this season however is the fact that the LAN finals will not be at the iconic Cyberarena this year. Having faced multiple issues in the past, which resulted in both Chinese representatives not being able to attend in season 11, the organizers have now decided to host their LAN finals at DreamHack Bucharest, which was home to last year's DreamHack Bucharest Invitational in Spring and the D2CL Season 4 finals in Fall.
The first match for StarLadder's 12th season will be Void Boys vs. Wheel in group A of the NA qualifier tonight at 23 CET.