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'League of Legends' adopts Overwatch League-style premium eSports pass
League of Legends isn't just one of the biggest games on the planet, it's perhaps the most popular eSport too. Starting with the upcoming Summer Split of the League Championship Series (LCS) and European Championship (LEC), Riot Games will offer a way to watch matches from pros' points of view, and see everything they do, including mouse clicks and keystrokes.
Hey, NPR: Stop trivializing eSports scholarships
On Monday, NPR's All Things Considered host Robert Siegel talked to New Tech City podcast host Manoush Zomorodi about Robert Morris University's new athletic scholarship program, the first of its kind in the United States – scholarships for League of Legends players. The hosts rattled off the stats: $500,000 for 30 scholarships, similar to some football scholarships the school offers. Zomorodi noted that 32 million people watched the final League of Legends championship game this year, more than watched the last game of the NBA finals. After talking to Robert Morris University's Associate Athletic Director Kurt Melcher, this happened: ZOMORODI: And from what I saw, Robert, it really was just like the football team or the track team - a tight-knit group. SIEGEL: (Laughter) So what's it like to be a collegiate e-athlete? Laughter. That's pulled directly from NPR's transcript of the broadcast, and you can listen to it here (this conversation at 3:08). During the final minutes of Siegel and Zomorodi's talk, there were titters and chuckles at factual information about the League of Legends scholarship. This bothered me.
Build your dream League team with Fantasy LCS
Haven't cracked the realm of League of Legends play that'll let you earn thousands of dollars from competing in the League Championship Series? Neither have a lot of other people, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy watching the world's best compete! Riot Games is launching the beta of Fantasy LCS this summer, which will let players construct imaginary team-ups between contestants from the North American and European LCS Leagues. Players can either join a pre-existing Fantasy LCS league or create one and invite their friends. Once a league is completely filled, players can begin selecting their roster. Teams include seven starters, which cover the top, jungler, mid, support and marksman positions in League matches, along with one extra flex player for any desired position and one real-life, non-imaginary LCS team. Participants will also pick three alternate players to sub for those in starter positions, but only starters will earn points in a league. Starting lineups can be modified each week, allowing for reactions to a LCS player's real-world performance or to just heed gut instincts. Players that weren't selected by anyone in a league can also be swapped in from a free agent pool. After starters are decided for the week, a player's team will be matched against a competitor's in their league, earning points for the abilities of their roster both on an individual LCS player and general LCS team level. The highest-scoring team wins a week's matchup, with the overall best record earning bragging rights for a league's top player at the end of the season. There's a fair amount of interest in Fantasy LCS, which has led to stability issues for the service, but everything is operating as normal at the time of this writing. [Image: Riot Games]
League of Legends kicks off third season of e-sports
League of Legends is about ready to begin its third season of the League Championship Series, and this time Riot Games is bringing a few interesting changes to the field. Season 3 goes live on February 7th for North America and Europe and features four-days-per-week of streamed e-sports as teams battle to become the best -- and bring home the dough. For Season 3, Riot is fiddling with the structure to make a new league ranking system that should offer a "greater sense of progression." Players will battle it out in six tiers of similarly matched teams until the cream rises to the top. To help all players understand the changes, Riot's provided a handy infographic and FAQ covering the pertinent points. There's also a goofy promo video of players running around an empty stadium in slow-motion, and you know you want to see that. It's after the jump. Thank us later.
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.
