MLG Winter Championships

It turns out this weekend was the quarterly MLG major event. The format seemed to change a fair bit. The last time I tuned in the MLG championships were pretty much a big open event. Top seeds would maybe get some byes or start off in a separate pool play while open entrants played double elimination, but the big thing was that anyone who wanted to show up and pay could play. This time around seemed different. They only had 32 people in the StarCraft II event, and it was straight single elimination. League of Legends ran 3 mini-events (12 standard LCS matches, a LCS qualifier from the minor leagues, and a 4 team exhibition event with a top EU team and a top Korean team against two of the NA LCS teams). I didn't watch any of the Call of Duty stuff, so I don't know how that worked. Fighting games and Halo were both dropped entirely. The crowds still seemed pretty big despite not being able to compete themselves, and the games all seemed to be pretty high quality. By getting rid of the whole 256 man bracket for SCII they were able to stream every game which was certainly nice, and they did it on only 2 SCII streams instead of 6 like last time.

The website also changed a bit. It used to be that MLG had their own combination stream thing where you could watch all the streams at once in a tiles layout. This time all of the streams were done through Twitch and the MLG site essentially just had tabs to select the 4 different streams. No way to watch all 4 at once easily. I guess I could have opened 4 web browser windows. It seems like the loss of functionality would be bad, but I actually liked it. MLG events have always had streaming issues in my experience, but this one went very smooth. Maybe that was the switch to Twitch. Maybe it was preventing all the viewers from watching all the streams at once and overloading things. Whatever it was, I liked it.

I didn't really know what was going on in the SCII games. They're using the new expansion that just came out and I didn't have a clue what most of the new units did. Also apparently you can build reapers without needing a tech lab now? Most of the matches seemed to be TvZ which makes me sad as an old Protoss player.

The LCS games were actually pretty great. Lots of the matches pitted a 'top 4' team against a 'bottom 4' team but the bottom 4 team won several of those games. I think maybe all the experience of playing professionally for a month and a half is finally starting to come home for some of these guys.

At any rate, I had a great time just sitting back and watching games all weekend. I also got some tax stuff done during pauses between games, so this may have been the most productive weekend I've had in a long time. Woo!

League of Legends: Championship Series

Riot has implemented something new and pretty cool for the pro scene in season 3. It would seem they've basically hired 16 pro teams to work for them like a pro sports league. All things consider it's something like 4 days a week for 6 months of games between the best of the best in North America and Europe. They've got studios set up (one in each region) and they're bringing in 6 teams per region each week to play a ton of games. Every game is being streamed live, in HD, for free, and videos are going up within hours of the day ending. The website with all the games is available here, and actually has a spoiler protection feature you can turn on so you don't know who won a given game before you start watching it.

This is a huge step towards making 'pro gamer' into a 'real' job. I can't find details about how much they're actually paying these guys but one guy said it was in the 20-30k range. That's not great by any means, but they're paying to fly the teams to the big tournaments like MLG and they're putting the spotlight on the teams which opens up the opportunity to make more money through streaming or sponsorships. And it's a steady income which is pretty clutch. On top of just wanting to watch lots of top tier games I'm excited to see if this sort of thing pans out and becomes a reasonable way for some people to make a living. It feels like if it works for League of Legends then they'll have laid down the infrastructure to allow other games to tag along. They're using the NA studio for 2 of the 7 days in a week, it only seems logical that subcontracting it out a couple of days for a pro Halo circuit or something could be feasible.

They've also announced an all-star game in mid season, and a way for teams to get promoted/relegated at the half-way mark. The top 32 teams on the public 5v5 ladder will get to play in a tournament to potentially get promoted into a salaried position. This feels like the sort of thing that might really keep people at the top of the game interested in pushing hard to get better. It's one thing when you might be able to fly yourself to an MLG event for a slim chance at making money. It's another when there's a guaranteed payoff for doing well without having to play the giants of the sport. The 4 qualifier teams have started off the NA season a combined 0-7, but they're still getting paid, and they're getting a chance to play matches that count against top opposition every week.

I'm a fan.