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On the ground at the League of Legends World Championships
It was about 1 p.m. at the Staples Center on Friday, and there was already a crowd. Five hours later, the mass of people would swell to many times the size, as security officers struggled to cram people into the building. At first glance, one could confuse the fans flooding the street as normal sports fans, but then you notice the cosplayers, the Intel-sponsored jerseys and an enormous Tryndamere statue. The Staples Center was packed to the gills with fans all eager to watch one thing: the final matches to determine who would walk away with the Summoner's Cup and the title of League of Legends World Champions.
Riot Games' plan to standardize eSports
Ask a couple of Riot Games' employees what goes into choosing players for League of Legends' annual World Championships, and they'll rattle off a strange series of acronyms and words that represent tournaments from around the world: Major League Gaming, the IGN Pro League, ESL's Intel Extreme Masters Series, OGN, IPL, Dreamhack, Tales of the Lane, and so many more.The route from just playing for free online to the top of the World Championship ladders is so confusing and circuitous that most press outlets don't cover it, most players don't follow it, and even most eSports fans couldn't explain it all. There's a jargon to it (littered with player and team names full of weird capitalization and strange spellings) that's about as complicated to understand as the notoriously complex game itself.Riot's Vice President of eSports Dustin Beck even says that a recent tournament he attended was a big mess on its own: "The tournament kept pausing, it never started on time, you didn't have a schedule to know when your favorite teams were playing. It wasn't a fun experience, for me."Still, eSports is one of the biggest factors in League of Legends' overwhelming popularity, with thousands of people attending these tournaments, and millions (almost ten million, in fact) watching live online. So how does Riot plan to smooth out those wrinkles that keep an even larger audience out of the game? The company will take the game into Season 3 within the next few weeks, and with it begins Riot's eSports headliner, the League of Legends Championship Series.
Riot apologizes for League of Legends tournament issues
If you peek, you did cheat -- or so sayeth Riot Games. The studio came forth to address several issues with this past weekend's $2 million League of Legends tournament, including allegations of cheating by participants. Viewers noted that tournament players were looking at competitors' minimaps on the large screen, and Riot admits that it didn't do enough to keep that particular temptation at bay. VP of eSports Dustin Beck apologized to LoL fans: "We're trying to deliver an extraordinary experience for viewers, and yesterday didn't live up to our goals. In hindsight, the potential visibility of minimap screens for players was a mistake." Riot is rescheduling the problematic matches and promised that the remainder of the tournament will be minimap temptation-free. Beck also mentioned that the team is looking into several disconnects that happened during the event. As an apology for what happened, Riot is granting all players double influence points for 24 hours following the finals match on October 13th.
