FnaticMSI wins!

The League of Legends season 1 championship has ended and Team FnaticMSI pulled out the win. I missed the games during the day since I was at work but the final match started right when I got home. Pretty sweet games in the final and throughout the weekend. I saw some heroes used in new ways and now have a strong desire to try them out and see what I can do.

The team I was rooting for sadly didn't make it to the finals, finishing in 3rd place. They did pick Vayne some of the time, but I actually saw Vayne work in a game. Laning with Janna and her shield (absorbs some damage taken and gives her some attack damage) seemed like it actually worked out pretty well.

Coin Toss Tournament

I was doing some reading on Dreamhack and came across a qualification tournament for the main Starcraft 2 event at Dreamhack. Essentially you had a 64 person single elimination tournament set up. The top 2 from that tournament qualified for Dreamhack. The winner of that tournament got to play a series against a known pro with 10000 SEK on the line. (Swedish Kronen, with an approximate value of $1500 Canadian.) It's not clear but I know the League of Legends qualifications came with airfare and hotel so it's possible this event did too. Either way the prizes seem pretty sweet. (First place at the Dreamhack main tournament is 100000 SEK, so $15k. It's noteworthy that the LoL tournament has a first place prize of $50k, though it is split 5 ways. I'd have thought the SC2 event would be worth a lot more but I guess Riot is really trying to pump up the LoL tournament scene.)

At any rate the qualifier tournament had an interesting twist. I asked Andrew about it and his opinion on the format agreed with mine and I wanted to solicit some other opinions on the matter. I will post my reaction to the format at a later date.

The twist? Most of the rounds were best of 3 matches of Starcraft 2. The 2nd and 4th rounds, however, were determined solely by flipping a coin. Thoughts?

Dreamhack!

Dreamhack is being held this weekend in lovely Sweden. According to Wikipedia it would seem that Dreamhack is the world's largest LAN event with lots of tournaments and gaming stuffs going on. Apparently 10% of attendees are female which sounds high (and yet so terribly low).

At any rate, the reason I care is that they're running the season one championship for League of Legends this weekend, and also a large Starcraft 2 tournament. Both events are going to be streamed live. Many casters are going to be streaming the SC2 games, with Day[9] being the most prominent one. (SC2 is running 5 games at a time to get everything done so other people will be casting games at the same time.) League of Legends seems to be running one match at a time so they're just going to have the one stream going. (LoL has 8 teams, SC2 has 48 players.)

The only downside is the event is in Sweden and it turns out that's on another side of the world and they haven't yet switched over to being awake at night and asleep during the day so their video game streams sync up with my life. (Work on that, Sweden!) The LoL stream at least starts at 4:30 am my time. I'm considering setting an alarm and waking up extra early...

I don't know much about many of the teams (though I did manage to catch the last few matches of the north american qualifier series a few weeks ago) but I'm going to pretty arbitrarily root for team Solomid. I just hope they don't draft Vayne, I never see anyone win with her. 8P