League of Legends has very rapidly become a huge game for e-sports, with massive prize pools and a following larger than most games ever manage. Riot Games has grown its e-sports division within its company similarly, and two members of that team took some time to talk to both the game’s fans and e-sports aficionados alike.
Structure
The first topic they discuss is the lack of a serious e-sports league in the same vein as professional athletic sports such as NFL or NBA. This is their reasoning behind forming the League of Legends Championship Series(LCS) for their third season. They now pay salaries to professional teams, meaning that even teams that do not have corporate sponsors can focus on their gaming, and spectators can tune in at scheduled times to watch professional games happen, something that e-sports in general tends to severely lack, with most events being far more haphazard even when sponsored.
They’ve built studios in both Los Angeles and Cologne for the North American and European professional leagues to provide consistent, clean footage of gameplay to help make League of Legends into the type of regular, weekly event as athletic sports have become to their own fans.
The League
The new league system is also addressed, pointing out that by creating a more exciting, competitive experience for players of all skill levels, they hope to help nurture and promote the growth of the “next round of pros” by giving them very clear goals, rather than a fairly arbitrary number.
Riot is also building an e-sports website. This site will allow players to track their favorite teams, letting them find out when they’re playing and how they’re doing. It will also enable them to have leaderboards to show how individual players perform over both long and short time frames, allowing fans actually follow their favorite solo top or AD carry.
Behavior
With the recent banning of professional players, they address the obvious question: have these bans actually caused a marked improvement in the professionalism and attitudes of professional players?
The simple answer is yes. They state clearly that these professional players are role models and need to behave accordingly, and that some of the professional players have actually been supporting the bans, along with the community at large, further reinforcing their desire to make League of Legends and its pros into something that the rest of the (notoriously toxic) MOBA online communities can look up to.
While Riot agrees that the timing of the most recent bans, specifically being right before the European qualifier, was very unfortunate, it was something they felt they had to do once they became aware of it and after looking at the specific cases, it’s hard to disagree.
Professional Game Types
Asked if they’d want to see other game types brought into the professional scene, Riot responded that such will be dependent upon fan desires. Things like ARAM and Dominion are both, for the short term, unlikely to be brought into the serious competition, though it is entirely possible one or both might show up in the All-Stars game that they’re planning for the mid-point of the LCS.
Television?
Not in the short-term. They might look into getting League of Legends on television eventually, depending on how big the LCS winds up actually getting. Riot does have the facilities to produce professional, television-grade shows with their new studios. Their championship arena, in particular, is equipped to handle television, but as most of their fans are online and not necessarily subscribing to cable, television is not an immediate priority.
The future and the past
While unwilling to state specifically where Riot expects League of Legends to be in five years, competitively, they did say that they see no reason why the game couldn’t be a successful sport, comparing it in terms of raw possibility to both soccer and football. They hope to have people following favorite teams and franchises, potentially keeping the game a competitive sport for a solid decade if not multiple decades.
Lessons learned? The finals from last year gave Riot Games some very rude awakenings between the repeated internet issues and cheating scandals, but they were lessons that Riot feels it has learned.
The big worldwide tournaments will continue in the future, as will the more local tournaments. League of Legends is continuing forward with all of those, the LCS is just a formalized addition, not a replacement. Here’s hoping it accomplishes its goals.
