As some of you may know, the Intel Extreme Masters tournament is on right now as part of CeBIT, in Hanover Germany. Having played League of Legends (hereafter LOL) for some time with a guy who likes watching competitive LOL, I have forever been bombarded with Youtube highlights of the latest going ons. I never really payed much attention beforehand. However, my interest piqued, I finally succumbed to the link he threw me last night to the tournament at IEM.
As someone who really enjoyed watching Starcraft 2 professional matches for some time, I was tepid about how LOL would work in a broadcast format. Five people all farming in three separate lanes, mostly concerned with simply last hitting the creeps. For the first quarter hour of some games, no one even dies. The multiple perspectives thing is the real problem though, as it’s hard to empathise as much with five little struggles instead of the very personal back and forth of a 1v1. It’s the same problem that’s kept me away from watching competitive Counter Strike but has made Street Fighter and Marvel vs Capcom so exciting.
In the end I stuck around for two matches of LOL. The first amazed me. SK Gaming, the most prevalent in eSports of all varieties, versus E-Home, a Chinese team. Within a few minutes, both teams had largely abandoned their lanes. The top lane, usually all important for dull farming and the ever important last hitting, was pretty permanently abandoned after the eight minute mark. Both teams moved as one unit, basically living inside of each other’s jungles. All that boring laning was completely abandoned and the problems of multiple perspectives to watch were abandoned. It was all team fights, all the time.
My other big worry about the game was that both teams would largely be just trying to outplay one another at LOL. Simply fighting better than each other with largely the same strategy. Instead, I was in for a treat. At a previous IEM in Kiev, the team Moscow 5 had forever changed the metagame (or “Meetah” as the players called it) to be more aggressive, something which SK Gaming took to heart and E-Home was still playing catch up on. There were two distinct styles on display for the whole game and SK, who took the most risks and played the most excitingly won the day.
At this point I was pretty pumped for the second game. Sadly, it fell far more into the traps I had imagined. Everyone stuck to their lanes for the first 25 minutes. The game ended not because one team was playing more excitedly than the other, but merely because one was playing better. Perhaps it was simply a more subtle game, but it was far less interesting and far less watch able. The commentor hurridly swapping between the lanes for most of the game put me in mind of Counter Strike where the viewpoint changes so often in broadcasts it is supremely difficult to both know what’s going on or care about any particular player.
I wonder if Riot Games aren’t watching these matches and slowly balancing the game towards a more interesting spectacle and away from its DOTA roots. No real conclusions today, just observation.
Radiant Agenda 