As eSports as a whole moves forward, they begin to resemble “normal” sports such as baseball and football more and more. YouTube even recognized some League of Legends videos under the sports section recently. Unexpected, though, was the announcement made yesterday that lolesports.com would host a fantasy LCS game.
The page claims that this feature is “coming soon” which makes it unclear of whether it will be ready to go with the upcoming Summer Split of the LCS about to begin. Riot employee “DanielZKlein” said that “we tested this internally over the spring split” and that there were dozens of leagues played within Riot. This is encouraging to see as far as getting access to the fantasy LCS as soon as possible.
EDIT: Fantasy LCS is ONLINE!
The game
Participants will be able to draft players from both the NA and EU LCS squads, offering 80 starting players in all to choose from to start with. Each team will include:
- 1 top laner
- 1 mid laner
- 1 jungle
- 1 ADC
- 1 support
- 1 “flex” player which is any position
- 3 substitutes
- one team as a whole (ie: picking CLG).
Each league will be able to have a maximum of 8 teams. The draft will happen in real-time, offering a 1 minute window between picks, meaning that you’d better do your homework beforehand! The interface looks amazing sleek, as you can see below:
In the introductory webpage, there is nothing to indicate trading between fantasy teams, but there will be free agents that you can add/drop for players already on your team. The season will play out like many other fantasy sports games, matching up against other teams each week with an easy to understand starting lineup page set before each week of the LCS.
Scoring
The scoring system seems to heavily favor KDA stats as opposed to objectives. This needs to be taken into account when drafting your players. A player, or perhaps players on a specific team, who gets more kills as opposed to objective control will be more highly valued. The scoring outline is as follows:
Players:
- Kills: +2 points
- Deaths: -.5 points
- Assists: +1.5 points
- CS: 0.01 points (200 CS = 1 kill)
- Triple Kill: +2 points
- Quadra Kill: +5 points
- Penta Kill: +10 points
- 10+ Kills/ Assist: +2 points
Teams:
- First blood: +2 points
- Dragons: +1 point
- Barons: +2 points
- Towers: +1 point
- Victory: +2 Points
While this announcement of a fantasy LCS game is absolutely amazing to avid League of Legends fans, it also shows how far eSports have come, and how far we plan to take them. ESports are rapidly increasing in popularity and more and more being considered to actual, real sports.
