DOTA 2 Reborn's kicked off a storm of envy in the League of Legends community, as can only be expected between two games of the same nominal genre. While I usually consider comparisons between the two a waste of time—each has been successful mostly by ignoring the other and doing their own thing—the client-side issue is an exception. As the features and functions offered by the rival game's rework lies largely outside in-game design and philosophy, there are less subjective grounds of direct comparison and criticism. In fact, the lack of functionality's been a sore point for quite a while.

Of course, it's worth recognizing that League of Legends is saddled with a tech debt that DOTA 2 doesn't have. LoL started as an indie release, after all: a small-scale game with a mere fraction of the original DOTA's heroes pool, made on a budget so tight that they had to resort to Adobe AIR as its basic framework. It's honestly impressive that Riot's been able to do so much building off so little. But while I doubt much of the original code still remains after years of revamps (fewer things are coded as invisible minions nowadays), the legacy structure imposes its limitations even unto present day.

If you're wondering why LoL seems full years behind DOTA 2, despite Riot being an absolutely gargantuan and wealthy beast of a company nowadays, it's entirely because of how they started. The tech debt of a Valve-backed project is comparatively much milder, simply because they can afford the initial resources and man-hour investments to future-proof the product. This goes doubly with Reborn, as it's explicitly meant to showcase Source 2's strengths.

But debt has to be paid off eventually—and now that Riot's one of the biggest studios out there with countless hundreds of employees to metaphorically shove at the problem, it's time to do so. And there are three features and updates, in particular, that need to be addressed in LoL 2.0.

Play it back again

Replays, already, please! It's been promised since Year 0, back when DOTA designer Steve "Guinsoo" Feak was a major and public presence with the company. Its basic structure and UI was demo'd on the Public Beta Environment a couple years ago, and there's been absolutely no word of it since.

Riot's excuse was that they wanted server-side storage, which is either a wet dream or nightmare for their recently hired games archivist depending on how she wants to look at it, and thus needed the infrastructure to back it up. Well, the Amsterdam server's up, the American ISPs have been largely negotiated with and their scheduled continental centralization is slated for "Soon."

And we're stuck here waiting, twiddling our thumbs, hoping that the on-switch'll be flipped any day now.

Look, replays are absolutely vital for any competitive game—and given the amount of resources pumped into Riot's esports department, surely they haven't actually overlooked this. Not only does it make for better competitive integrity (video replays catch visual bugs, but being able to examine the code-level interactions is even better—don't be like FIFA with their allergy to video referees), but it makes for better professional play too. Even Riot's extremely well-trained LCS spectators can't catch everything—rewind functions are saved for major fights, so seemingly inconsequential skirmishes that nonetheless set up the results of later interactions tend to get passed over.

True, third-party replay services do exist. But native support makes a big difference—namely, they're not expected to break from patch to patch, and are expected to have Riot's full support and customer service backing their use.

Wax on wax off

To more fundamentally back up a replay system, a sandbox mode should absolutely be implemented as well. And this, too, is vital for the game's competitive development. Custom game modes are not enough—even the basics of something as fundamental as last-hitting are mostly taught and learned inefficiently, with no way to practice the nuances affected by level and income (nothing in the game tells you how to farm against a turret. You're forced to learn haphazardly that it's tower-tower-auto for melee and auto-tower-auto for caster minions, but only at specific ranges of Attack Damage). And never mind specific optimized combos affected by cooldown reduction, how attack speed affects attack-move commands, or exactly how far away a jungler can be from a lane and still be in time for a gank before the minion wave moves out of range.

Team-level practices are similarly sub-optimal in the current paradigm. Practicing optimal wave control is one thing, but the development of micro-level playbooks are largely rudimentary thanks to the lack of good ways to practice. The best way to towerdive, the best timings for laneswaps, exactly how to transition from laning to fighting to take advantage of powerspikes—all of these have level- and gold-dependent nuances that make it very difficult to practice or test on a deliberative basis.

Combine sandbox and replay, and what do you get? Like a decade's worth of Christmas presents to every pro team across the globe, all at once. Imagine an eleventh-person catbird seat for a coach in command on a per-session basis, setting relative experience and gold values, starting conditions, and matchups. Imagine being able to set up specific fights and positions to test approaches and tactics!

Imagine that a DDOS was just a nuisance, and a savestate can be made of a game to be returned to on a later basis. It would actually be a damn shame if the server-side replay storage wasn't designed with this specific feature in mind, given just how often DDOSes have affected the Challenger Series teams—and, indirectly, who's had a chance to make it into the LCS.

How do I shot skills

For the preceding two features, I discussed mainly on the basis of competitive play. They cross-apply to players of all skill levels, of course, but it's admittedly less obvious why an account level one newbie would even care about fine-tuning and rewatching their plays.

But replays and sandboxes set up the infrastructure for something that League of Legends desperately, desperately needs. The last feature I want is not, by any means, the least: a massively retooled tutorial.

It's been said ad nauseum: unless you want to distill it to Heroes of the Storm's simplicity, MOBAs aren't easy games to get into. While the esports aspects and streaming culture's successfully raised an unmatched player population, that really only makes it even more daunting for the new player to enter the fray. Fighting versus bots is all well and fine, but bots don't give step-by-step instructions on the whys and hows of good warding, ganking, or itemization.

A sandbox and in-game rewind function, though, greatly expands the scenarios that can be scripted to teach newcomers. If a newbie were to play a one-on-one fight on Howling Abyss versus a ramped-up AI, the ability to rewind and show them how the fight would play out with an entirely different item set or skill level sequence would be vastly more educational than the current Ashe-only Thornmail-building joke that's currently used to teach the basics.

It's not hard to imagine an entire range of single-player missions and challenges too. "Here's a level 6 Nocturne—help your ally and gank the mid laner!" Or with higher difficulties, "Shurima's under siege—pull a Froggen and defend your nexus alone against a swarm of super minions with Azir, while the enemy team harasses you!" Heck, they can monetize this and fulfill a largely unwhetted appetite for League of Legends lore too by designing IP/RP-unlockable scenario packs with this specific objective in mind: to vastly expand the tools and means of teaching players, and make it fun to do so.

There are plenty more things that can be added to an upgraded LoL. Opt-in voice chat to replace Curse Voice, two-key authorization to protect accounts that can often be valued at hundreds of dollars (guilty as charged—look, I really liked the new Lux skin, and I'm collecting Sona's), among countless other little things and small tweaks. I'd especially like a mobile app to spectate games, bet IP on outcomes, and manage runes and other account settings. But the three above? They are a level-up for LoL itself. They mature it in a way that no other updates really will. More so than itemization fixes. More so than new champions or skins.

They would make League of Legends itself, in and out of game, a much better experience.

Riot Games is teasing what appears to be a new League of Legends Champion known as The River King. On the outside, he looks like just an overgrown catfish, but he deals like the devil and he'll swallow you whole.

That description doesn't come from any official source, but I like to think that it fits with the tone set in the trailer, which was transcribed by the good folks at the League of Legends Wiki. "Boy, the world's one river, and I'm its king. Ain't no place I ain't been. Ain't no place I can't go again," the River King says to the gambler. "And the price is a minuscule thing. See, I got hungers that ain't easily fed. But those finest tables? They ain't never got a seat for me. So I need men, like yourself, to let me in."

I don't want to spoil anything for you, but I will say that this story doesn't take place in Georgia, and this gambler doesn't appear to be the best there's ever been. The Wiki contains a few other details as well, which may or may not be important: A Rift Scutler turns up, the River King has the same accent as Twisted Fate, and Twisted Fate may in fact be the gambler in question, a theory that's also come up in the LoL Reddit. The River King also appears to be wearing a hat, although the image is hazy and it could be... well, I really don't know.

I'm sure we'll find out soon enough, and we'll let you know when we do. Until then, speculation ahoy!

At the start of the 2014 LCS series, Riot Games said it would donate all fines collected over the course of the season to a worthwhile charity. Today it announced that those fines totaled $31,850, all of which has been donated to The Trevor Project, a charity that provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services for LGBTQ youth.

"For the first major donation, we wanted to see the money collected from the 2014 make a difference to one cause," Riot said in the announcement. "When we sat down and thought about what was meaningful to us as a community, one cause resonated with most of us—the fight against harassment and discrimination."

And while the fines are the result of bad behavior among League of Legend players, Riot emphasized that the majority of the LoL community is firmly against abuse: Games in which players used homophobic slurs and exhortations to suicide were reported a significantly higher rate than those that included simple F-bombs.

"As a community, you find these words hurtful and unacceptable and so do we," Riot wrote. "We know that harassment and its consequences goes beyond just words in a game—and that s why the work of organizations like The Trevor Project is so important. We hope that this money will be able to boost their work creating a safe and inclusive environment for all of us, regardless of sexual orientation."

Riot has rolled out a number of measures to combat "extreme toxicity" in League of Legends over the past year, most recently an automated system of punishment for players who engage in abusive in-game behavior.

There are hundreds of TV stations in Seoul and one of them is devoted entirely to fishing, but it s still strange to flick through them and come across two channels of esports. You thumb past a K-pop video and an episode of Vampire Prosecutor¹ and suddenly your TV screen is full of League of Legends or StarCraft II or FIFA. It s especially odd watching FIFA since more recent games in the series have become so similar to actual televised soccer that there s a second of confusion where you think the new season s players have even more terrible haircuts than usual before you realize they re digital.

The steps that lead South Korea to have this level of acceptance for competitive gaming read like something out of an alternate history novel. While early consoles were widely available there, sometimes thanks to local manufacturers creating clones of them², in the 1990s the games themselves became more restricted. While violent PC games were sometimes censored—even StarCraft had to be modified and sold in two different versions, one rated Teen and the other Adult—console games were hit harder. Not because they were more violent, but because they were more Japanese. In 1994 the Korean government banned mass media from using the Japanese language, and the delay caused by localizing massive JRPGs meant they were beaten to the market by pirate copies and illegal imports. They were the most popular genre of console game in South Korea, and yet it wasn t worthwhile selling them there³.

Where consoles struggled, PCs caught up the slack. They were helped by the South Korean government s massive investment in telecommunications and internet infrastructure. The country now has some of the fastest internet in the world, making online gaming an attractive lag-free proposition even in its infancy. And those esports channels wouldn t exist if it weren t so cheap to get a TV station up and running in Seoul. Now Korea has esports arenas and prizes valued in the millions, but even so the audience is still mostly casual, switching loyalties from team to team as their fortunes change. It s a large niche, but it s still a niche, and nothing compared to the audience for mukbang, for instance—videos of people eating, which are massively popular on streaming service AfreecaTV and earn a living for some of the people making them⁴.

Competitive gaming is a large niche, but it s still a niche, and nothing compared to the audience for mukbang.

While esports is a bigger deal in South Korea than it is in the west, it hasn t resulted in the paradise of mainstream acceptance for video games outsiders assume it has. Education is incredibly important in Korean culture—another reason the PC is so prominent, as you can pretend it s totally being used for homework, Dad—and gaming is seen as an impediment to young people s study habits. The Youth Protection Revision bill, passed in 2011, bans players under 16 from online games between midnight and 6.00am. It s colloquially known as the Cinderella law, and its purpose is to prevent kids from neglecting schoolwork because they re up all night playing MapleStory or World of Warcraft⁵. Even though the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism created an organizational body called KeSPA, the Korean e-Sports Association, gaming remains as mistrusted by the government and media as it is anywhere else.

On Twitch, where the audience is made of people who are already video game fans, League of Legends is the most-watched game. But on YouTube, with its much a broader audience, League of Legends is number five. Number one by a gigantic margin is Minecraft. According to Octoly s figures there were 3,900 million views of Minecraft videos on YouTube in April. Number two on the list, Grand Theft Auto, had 1,390 million monthly views. It s not hard to see why the YouTube audience watches Minecraft in overwhelming preference to other video games. They don t watch it for competition, but it to see people playing the same way they do, experimenting with mods and co-operating to build amazing, extravagant things. The feats of exceptionalism they re interested in are when someone builds Minas Tirith or the Starship Enterprise or all of Westeros.

'Video games are like sports' can be a useful analogy for explaining our hobby to people who don t play games, but in the long run it does a poor job demonstrating why games matter. It s the games you can t really compare to something that already exists that can convince people to take them seriously. When parents worry about what their kids are playing, when governments change their mind about censoring games again, when the media ham-fistedly covers the latest controversy, the competitive side of games won t convince them to take a more serious look. Showing them the cooperation required to work together with a group of friends to make castles in the sky is both more honest to the average person s experience of games and more likely to win them over.

Personally I d rather be watching the K-pop channel than Minecraft, though. At least until someone uses that game to create mermaids being turned into sushi or post-apocalyptic warlords in outfits this fabulous.

¹It s about a prosecutor who is a vampire, not a human who prosecutes vampires. That would just be silly.

²In the Yongsan Electronics Market there s a place called Video Game Alley where I found a Samsung Gam*Boy for sale, Korea s equivalent of the Sega Master System. Samsung followed the Gam*Boy with the Super Gam*Boy, which ran Genesis games, though it was later renamed the Alladin Boy after the popular game based on the movie.

³This was exacerbated by worries about the potential for games to cause epileptic fits in children. Remember the mass hysteria over Pokemon Shock when an episode of the anime was blamed for Japanese children suffering fits? A similar outcry occurred in South Korea when a boy experienced a fit while playing Street Fighter II, and again it was primarily Japanese games and consoles that lost sales because of parental concern.

⁴Mukbangs or eating broadcasts are livestreams in which someone eats a large meal in front of a camera while interacting with viewers via chat. Mukbangs are incredibly popular and their hosts, or Broadcast Jockeys (yes, BJs for short), receive fan donations that can add up to a lot. In Korean culture meals are traditionally a social activity and it s often difficult to order food for one in a restaurant because everything is served with the expectation of communal eating. Modern lifestyles and work habits results in a lot more people eating at home alone and so the mukbangs restore a sense of the social to dinnertime.

⁵To sign up for online games in South Korea you need to provide a Korean Social Identity Number and phone number so that your age can be verified. Punishments for getting around the system, say by using your parents ID without permission or buying one from the thriving black market, can result in up to two years imprisonment and a $9,000 fine.

League of Legends is nominally a free to play game, but you wouldn't know it by how it's designed. This isn't a Penny Arcade-esque joke about its skins and cosmetics—that part of how it's structured is perfectly fine, and a laudable accomplishment on part of the company's artists and conceptualists that new champions and skins sell as well as they do.

But the runes, though. And rune pages. It's long past time that they were reworked from the ground up.

Currently, it costs 6300 IP to buy a new rune page, and roughly that to max out on one kind of rune. The same cost of a newly released champion, and equivalent to days of hard grinding. Though it is entirely possible to play with only the two default pages given freely to each account, that still tallies up to an exorbitant cost just to fill one page. Even if you're reusing certain runes between multiple pages, and the same two pages for literally every champion, the total time for a new player to fill both pages and a decent stable of champions is incredibly steep. A barrier to entry that affects not just newbies, but everybody who can't afford to dump whole hours into the game on a daily basis.

Using time invested as a content gate is perfectly alright in a progression-based game, especially single-player RPGs, but it hardly makes sense for a competitive lane-pusher. Inherently, it rewards repetition of play over skill—level one trades decided not by tactical feats of ingenuity, or even cunning customization choices, but whether or not a player can afford a beneficial rune loadout to complement the matchup.

There's also the issue where, as they are designed now, runes are almost pointless anyhow. The statistical and practical value of each optimized almost instantly, no matter how often they're updated, so that every role and every champion has a pro- and analyst-certified best kit. The point of customization is lost due to how the current system is designed, again making it so that it's more a matter of who's invested enough time to buy full power, rather than who's the better player.

That can't stand. The customization system for League of Legends is one of its more interesting facets, standing in contrast to other MOBAs. The adjustments and tweaks it offers a playstyle can turn losing lanes into winners, weak points into strengths, or at least get your mage closer to that all-important 40% cooldown reduction maximum. But it needs to change to make it work as intended, and I have a few ideas for that.

True Mastery

First thing is: make it easier to access. The new Champion Mastery system, currently just a cosmetic addition for hyperfocusing on specific champions, is ideal for these purposes. The only form of progression-style play that should be encouraged in a competitively driven game like League of Legends is progression in skill and familiarity—which is why I'm not making a big fuss about the time needed to reach account level 30, as it'd take that long to get over the burden-of-knowledge hump in the first place.

But what then? An extra emote and a fancy banner or champion icon overlay is a fairly dismal award for the time invested. An extra rune page, though, would actually be commensurate with the effort invested—and would leave the newbie player enough IP to actually use the page by picking up a set of runes, armed with extensive champion practice to know what set to pick up in order to either complement their strengths or offset the weaknesses they've experienced.

Speaking of picking up rune sets: the current rune tiers are a joke. Tier 1 sets might be enough for low-level play, and cheap besides, but their usefulness quickly expires. And Tier 2s are at an awkward spot—too expensive for their value, and sitting at a level range where you want to be saving up for Tier 3s anyhow. The tiered "progression" is nonsense and wasteful, especially since they finally removed the Rune Combiner this season, after years of having it be a way for trolls and phishers to seriously mess up a hijacked account.

Better, I think, to have individual runes be more expensive, so long as they level as your account levels. Or, even better: a lot of veteran players have complained about the lack of an IP sink. Being able to upgrade old or rarely used rune sets from Tier 1 to Tier 3 via IP would be a good way to do just that.

Heck, in keeping with the cosmetics monetization theme, they can even bling them out with a dual RP/IP option. Gold, crystal or rainbowed rune sets—no statistical bonuses for "upgrading," but for the opportunity to show off a decked out page on-stream.

Actual Options

The second thing to do: make customization meaningful. And this bit is more challenging.

Part of the problem with cookie-cutter builds is sheer inevitability. When runes involve hard and static values, like flat Attack Damage or health points per level, they have a hard and static corresponding in-game value, measured by their equivalents in item-based bonuses. Contrast those values with the stats that are most relevant to the roles they play, and the actual range of viable options quickly narrows.

You can't really keep pro players and analysts from figuring out best-value sets, but you can make them more situational, so that the hard value calculations are set aside and it becomes a matter of tailoring to strategy instead. In continuing with the earlier article of applying lessons from other games to League, Splatoon's gear customizations include bonuses based on the phases of a match—early-game out-of-the-gate bonuses versus last-chance bonuses.

Applying that to AP or AD-per-level runes, where you gain comparatively more or less based on how close or far you are from level 18, helps augment based on overall team playstyle, and whether they want to play a patient or aggressive strategy. Threat detection too, basing stat bonuses on how many allies or enemies are close to you—or aren't. Conditional runes like that could tailor themselves towards poke or pick strategies, or further strengthen all-in brawling compositions that want full-fledged wars over Dragon and Baron.

Either way, decoupling champion modification from hard statistical value shouldn't be impossible—difficult to design, yes, and worth a very long test run before implementing publicly. But when the whole point of customization is to make the champion play to personal stylistic preferences, it's a design space worth developing.

Riot Games has suspended League of Legends commentator Martin "Deficio" Lynge for failing to report ongoing negotiations with the Copenhagen Wolves over an offer of a job with the team. Riot said in a statement that his failure to disclose his contact with the Wolves "showed poor judgment in navigating this conflict of interest."

The matter came to light as a result of allegations that Lynge had discussed the strategy of SK Gaming with Wolves head coach Karl "Dentist" Krey prior to a match between the teams. Krey had told his players that Lynge was feeding him information about SK's plan, but a subsequent investigation determined that no such conversation had actually taken place, and that Krey had only boasted about having inside information "in the interest of shoring up his authority with the team."

However, the investigation also revealed that the Wolves had offered Lynge a management position following the conclusion of the 2015 season, and that there had been "ongoing conversations" between the two over the previous six weeks—conversations that Lynge failed to mention to Riot.

"Although it s not unusual for Rioters to be approached with offers from LCS organizations, it s important that the organization and Rioter let us know as soon as an offer is made to raise awareness around potential conflicts of interest," Riot said. "In this case, we believe that [Lynge] showed poor judgment in navigating this conflict of interest. Over the course of our investigation we found evidence indicating that [Lynge] had begun speaking with several active LCS players—contracted and free agents—about their future and the possibility of working with them on the Copenhagen Wolves. These conversations influenced—or had the potential to influence—player decisions on where they chose to play, and affected the competitive integrity of the LCS."

Riot declared that Lynge's actions constituted tampering, and that while it's inevitable that he'd have relationships with various pro players because of his own status as a former pro, "his unique position as a shoutcaster and representative of the EU LCS meant that his actions were inappropriate and a breach of the trust that the League and Riot places in him."

As a result of the lapse, Lynge has been suspended from broadcasting until week four of the current LCS season, and will not cover any Copenhagen Wolves games for the indefinite future. He will also be prevented from joining any LCS team for the remainder of the 2015 season and all of 2016, and on top of that, "be subject to internal disciplinary measures which by law are confidential."

"Our goal is not to mandate that all Rioters approached by external organizations report their conversations to us. In the case of esports, however, where crossing the line in terms of competitive integrity can be so easily done, making us aware of the job offer would have allowed Martin (and us) to sidestep the almost inevitable conflicts of interest that came up," Riot said. "Reporting firm job offers doesn't challenge the Rioters' position—whether or not they choose to take up the offer—but it creates transparency in a competitive environment where we ask for total neutrality from Rioters."

In a statement of his own on Facebook, Lynge said he made "poor decisions" and failed to take the matter as seriously as he should have. "Throughout my career as pro player and shoutcaster, I have always been close with a lot of players and I value these relationships very highly. This will not change but I have had to learn the difference between talking to a player as friends and talking as a Rioter," he wrote. "It is 100% NOT okay to give opinions on career choices and to share your own potential future plans as a Rioter, as it can impact a player s decision making. While I never intended any harm, I definitely didn t act in the professional manner that I expect from myself and as Riot expects from me." He added that Riot has been supportive throughout, and isn't trying to force him to stay on as a broadcaster.

Krey, the Wolves coach, was also suspended until week four, for obstructing Riot's investigation and being complicit in the tampering. Because Riot found no evidence that Lynge had actually shared information regarding team strategies, however, the result of the SK Gaming/Copenhagen Wolves match—which, by the way, the Wolves won—will stand.

Speaking as a writer that covers a scene easily considered one of the most well-funded and supported in the entire esports ecology... I'm kind of jealous of everybody else.

It's not as if the League of Legends scene isn't vibrant and healthy—the increased challenger scene support across the board (with rumors of an expanded tournament even here in Taiwan) guarantees a baseline of fresh talent even as the current generation of pro players retire or burn out. The collegiate scene just had a major Riot-backed and casted face-off a while ago as well. So Riot's plans to extend the health of the scene for years to come seems like it's ticking away like a well-oiled machine. Though it'll be at least five more years (twice its current lifetime) before we truly know if their investment's paid off, we do know that they've successfully dominated the Korean and Chinese esports scene for a length of time unprecedented by any game but Brood War.

That's not too shabby for a company younger than my baby sister. Yet it's also been a dominance and longevity entirely driven by them as well—a case of strongly top-down design. And that inherently has some limitations and restrictions for how the scene develops.

Lessons from the bootstrap

I've gotten deeply into the Super Smash Bros. Wii U scene lately, and it is definitely Quite The Other Thing. Twitch's recent acquisition of D'Ron Maingrette and Arian Fathieh, major community figures, speaks well of the game's current growth. But while the whole Project M kerfuffle hinted at heavy-handed measures from Nintendo or other involved corporate interests, there is no dispute whatsoever that the Smash scene is one of almost purely grassroots love.

There are drawbacks to the grassroots approach, of course. No careful reputations management and background checks means you get the Alex Strifes floating around, making everybody involved with Apex look bad. There are the rookie tournament organizers running events for the first time, like seemingly with MVG Sandstorm, and drowning under the unexpected seas of complexity as they juggle schedules, setup malfunctions, busted CRT TVs, Challonge messing up the ladder, upon other crises. And all amid a much larger crowd of participants than the 10-20 they originally expected. Not to mention drunk casters, drunk players, and drunk hecklers—even in supposedly dry events!

On the other hand, that's also where the charm is. The informality and lack of barriers between tournament "officials," players, and audience is something you can't replicate even with Riot's almost obsessive approach to public interaction (and which Valve refuses to try at all). There is a very tangible sort of communal ownership—nobody visible in the scene's gotten to where they are without making their bones as just another player getting yelled at for tripping over a console by an overstressed TO.

For all of its lows, the heights of grassroots hype is unmatched and heady. Its best TOs are amazing organizers, especially with a shoestring budget. Its best rivalries are entirely organic—the trashtalk all the better for the peppery fire of offscreen interactions that makes the TSM vs CLG beef look like lean lunchmeat. While the League of Legends era mainstream tournament conductors have done a much better job of humanizing its competitors (the complaints about robotic KeSPA players fallen by the wayside), there is no escaping its nature as an engineered media event.

ZeRo calling out Falcon mains and Smash Wii U players in general was definitely deliberate on his part. But it was no company-manufactured hype. It wasn't a storyline sold to heighten and maintain an audience's interests—it was the champion from Chile throwing the gauntlet down at friends, allies, enemies and rivals alike out of personal interest and investment in the growth of the Smash Wii U scene. Presumably just the same as his friends, allies, enemies and rivals.

There isn't a whole lot of that in League, is there? No money matches in quite a while. Salty suites risk fines if they get too salty (not that we shouldn't, frankly, fine all or most of EUW and EUNE anyhow). Heck, small-scale weeklies have fallen by the wayside of the lumbering, unstoppable LCS machine. Alphadraft's Challenger League's the latest and last of those beasts—but how indie do we really consider a site backed by a Donald Sterling-led investment round worth a posh $5 million?

I'm not really calling for a return to Season 2, when we had DOTA2 and CS:GO's current superabundance problem, with the packed and overlapping schedule of tournaments diluted the importance and hype of all but the biggest. But I do wonder why the grassroots level's so poor, especially in the west. It's not as if has to be—China's got so many tournaments, EDG claimed a cool 22 trophies in the course of a year. And, sure, LPL letting their top teams play is kind of cheating compared to the LCS situation—but where's the interest in running locals and regionals?

Why are we, as a scene, satisfied with just watching TSM play, or Faker dunking mid lane newbs? Why aren't you running a summoner showdown from out of your dorm, having people square off on Howling Abyss 1v1s for the fun of it, and baiting it with a nice little pool of prize money made from the entry fees?

Where it starts

Let me make one last indulgent callback to the days of Season 2, when I was still a wide-eyed esports rookie. Most people know Christopher "MonteCristo" Mykles as OnGameNet's star analyst, breaking down the intricacies of Korean play for the western audience. Some might remember that he was owner and founder of ggChronicle, one of the first independent coverage sites dedicated to League of Legends (Solomid.net predates it, but was obviously answerable to team interests).

Long before League of Legends was an international phenomena, selling out the Staples Center and dominating the esports world, MonteCristo was a paralegal running a community site on the side, paying out of his own pocket to send me up to San Francisco for Curse Invitational coverage (I've since deleted and burned the videos—I have horrible camera presence), and personally hitting the beat to get advertisers to back the ggClassic. We were the first western organization to get the Taipei Assassins to face off against western teams, long before their Season 2 World Championship win. One of the vanishingly few to do regular recaps of the GPL, the first of the game's weekly circuits, and the OnGameNet Champions under Moletrap. My fellow writers, podcasters and vloggers from that era now range from supervising editor at Canada's TheScore (hi Matt), to Riot employees, or to professional casters.

None of us were anything particularly special, except that we chose to be involved instead of staying spectators. We loved the scene, and wanted to be a part of it—not apart from it. And that's what's required to keep the scene healthy in the years to come: not just for its players to be fostered and trained to ever-heightened levels, but for people to want to give them a place to show off their increasing skills, and to hand over a mic for casters to learn to get over stage fright.

We can't rely on Riot for everything. We really shouldn't want to. Eventually, you'll have to ask yourself "what can I do?"

And then, simply, you do it.

Riot Games is determined to purge League of Legends of its toxic elements, and a new automated system takes a step in the right direction. Basically, any chat logs containing evidence of harrassment will be evaluated by a system, which will email the relevant text to the offender along with the applicable punishment. 

It works like this: teammates or opponents report a toxic player, whereafter the automated system sends through a reform card to the offender. The system also determines the severity of the punishment, ranging two-week to permanent bans.

The system is rolling out for testing in North America today, and Riot's "player behavior team" will personally vet the first few thousand cases to judge the systems viability. If it works, it'll go global. Eventually the system could be used to reward positive player behavior, too. 

It's the latest in a long line of recent moves to clean up the League of Legends scene: fresh disciplinary measures were rolled out in July last year, including denying toxic players from joining ranked queues. 

The thing about competitive gaming is that eye candy really isn't part of the experience. The prettiest backdrops in the world don't mean a thing if you lose. So Riot is adding an option to League of Legends that will make it easier to tune out the background noise.

"Recently we added an option to the Game tab in the menu called 'Hide Eye Candy'," Riot JxE wrote in the League of Legends forums. "Some of our more competitive players requested the the option to hide some of the less subtle movement on Summoner's Rift. We added the option to disable things like butterfiles, dragonfiles and the water wakes to help competitive players focus on what they care about, the gameplay."

Old-timers may recall cranking down the resolution in Quake to maximize framerates and thus the opportunity to get on the trigger before the other guy. But that was about squeezing every last drop of performance out of hardware that could sometimes be overwhelmed by all the on-screen action, whereas this toggle simply does away with potential sources of distraction.The concept is essentially the same, though: sacrificing visual quality for a better competitive edge.

The hookups should be enabled in the next PBE [Public Beta Environment] deployment, he wrote, adding, "Only ambient critters that persist after 1:55 will be disabled by this option. You can continue to perfect the dark ritual necessary to spawn the Duck." I have no idea what that means, but I assume it's important somehow.

The coming of the summer split is heralded by the smell of barbequed careers. The World Championship's now just a scant five months away, and while that might seem a long time to us mere mortals, it's no time at all for teams. The spring split and Mid-Season Invitational took measure of their capabilities—and left the majority of them found wanting, even among the topmost teams.

The stink of it this year's been especially intense—Counter Logic Gaming dropping Austin "Link" Shin set off a chain reaction of drama that hasn't yet fully settled down. Similarly, though Cloud 9's Hai Lam stepping back wasn't entirely unexpected due to his decline in strength, the break-up of the long-lasting roster entailed much wailing and gnashing of teeth from its supporters.

But the big question for either of them, and all of the teams and regions locking in their rosters for the summer, is "has it helped?" The summer split is a merciless time—their one last chance this year to make it big, leaving no margin for error.

Crossing the Rhine

The good news is, Europe's out of their rut! Fnatic's breathtakingly aggressive performance back at Tallahassee demonstrated progressive evolution—enough to give SKT T1 a jolting scare, coming within a desperate game to take the best-of-five. The great news is, they're not going to be alone in this.

Much of the criticism levied at Europe over the past seasons was their regional timidity—a low-risk approach to play influenced by CLG.EU and characterized by extended laning phases and late-game emphasis. The key exceptions were Gambit Gaming and Fnatic, but the decline of the former thanks to the geographic burdens of the centralized EU LCS circuit meant that most of the trickle-down influences afflicting Europe came from teams that largely didn't know how to close out the game without a monumental gold lead or late-game scaling carries.

That's no longer so much a part of the EU metagame fabric, thanks to the efforts of Fnatic, in any of their iterations, and the infusion of fresh blood over the last year. Teams like UOL don't know when to quit, even for their own good, and teamfights churn out for minutes at a time. And the returning veterans from Origen aren't slouches in the high-risk/high-impact play style either—probably not a coincidence that Origen is basically Old Fnatic coming back to show these newcomers what for.

It is a necessary evolution for the scene, not only to keep pace with China and even Korea's aggressive early-game strategies, but because the game has been steadily balanced in favor of their sort of early-game risk management. A combination of the current tank dominance and the scaling-back of AD carries makes late-game oriented farm strategies categorically inferior to those structured around early- and mid-game dives and dragon fights. If they can keep the pace, they should be pretty happy with their odds come October.

Land of the free (wins)

While the EU is coming out of a passive rut, North America seems to be slipping into one. TSM's disappointing performance at the Mid-Season Invitational highlighted significant deficiencies in the region overall—for instance, their lack of mid lane strength outside of Soren "Bjergsen" Bjerg had an unintended crab-bucket effect highlighted by his inability to make an impact against international teams also known for their mid laners.

Simply put, for the last year, Bjergsen hasn't had to fight against anybody that could come within a shadow of his own capabilities. He's forgotten how to be the underdog in a scrap. And TSM's forgotten what it's like to face teams that are actually capable of abusing timing weaknesses and stagnant play.

To the chagrin of regional purists, the solution for this probably won't come from within the North American scene. The next-best mid lane talent from spring comes from China's Yu "Xiaoweixiao" Xian, on Team Impulse, or Team Liquid's Kim "Fenix" Jae-hun, from Korea. Cloud 9, in particular, has taken a page out of TSM's own books, scouting abroad in Europe to take advantage of their comparatively greater pool of mid lane talents. Nicolaj "Incarnati0n" Jensen, fresh out of purgatory, is expected to be Bjergsen's peer—a fellow mid laner, a fellow Dane, and anticipated to be a fellow monster upon the North American circuit.

That doesn't seem to solve North America's long-term issues, though, or strategic deficit. In particular, the coaching shortfalls dramatically illustrated by Counter Logic Gaming's (latest) descent into madness don't appear to be solved for most of the region's teams—though one would certainly hope that Brandon "SaintVicious" DiMarco's announced retirement from Gravity's lineup is more of a transition into that role, given the job's requisites in authority and experience.

It might be some time before North America's Worlds-ready, though—probably not this year, in fact. While it speaks well for them to be willing to retool so heavily, such as with Team 8 dumping the perennially struggling Ainslie "frommaplestreet" Wyllie for Zachary "Nientonsoh" Malhas, the act of retooling at all is something you do in hopes of better long-term growth. In the short term, they're left in an even worse position than they were before, having to rebuild their team identity.

Gone with the Winds

All hail the new age of Taiwanese esports! ...kinda. AHQ's Westdoor fulfilled his promise to avenge Yoe Flash Wolves' loss to Team Solomid, and overall rebuffed all doubters that the LoL Master Series deserved their World Championship seeds.

The problem is actually winning Worlds, or at least coming into contention for it.

Sure, sure. Taiwan now has a 2-1 record against Europe, and have pulled ahead of North America. But while it's a great thing for the region to be so solid against the LCS circuits, the real challenge is against their closer neighbors across the Strait and up north on the peninsula. Frankly, they can't handle Edward Gaming or SKT T1, and don't appear to be capable of doing so anytime soon.

The scrim system set up between the coaches network of the three regions has done a lot for the scene, elevating them to a respectable plateau, but it can't solve the smaller player base and poorer infrastructure the LMS is saddled with. They have fewer endemic sponsors to work with, fewer Challengers to recruit and foster, and the banning or retirement of even a single star player can cast doubt upon the region's hopes. And with both Sa "GreenTea" Shang-Ching and Chen "Winds" Peng-Nien retiring this year, my poor region's in for some rough weather.

Of course, "retiring" in esports is extremely conditional. GreenTea's "retirement" was crucial to AHQ's current success, as he now fills an analysis and background support role they were severely lacking. And while Winds isn't as closely tied to the Taipei Assassins now, focusing more on streaming (alas), he's still contracted to help them out with training and analysis—not to the same extent as GreenTea, but still better than letting the man that single-handedly taught Taiwan to jungle to simply slip through the cracks.

World's best

Of course, the only story of any real consequence in the road to worlds is the heated rivalry between China's LPL and Korea's LCK—and, more specifically, the anticipated rematch between Edward Gaming and SKT T1. The Mid-Season Invitational back in Tallahassee, Florida, was the first time in two years that Korea's lost an international tournament they've shown up at, and it's clear that the direct and external causes of that's all at China's feet. Not just by Coach Aaron's unbelievably devious pick-ban strategies neutralizing Faker in crucial games of their now-legendary best-of-five set, but in how China's billionaire scions have neutralized the Korean region as a whole.

It should rightfully be upsetting to long-time esports fans that KeSPA's not only failed to invest properly into their world-class teams, but failed further yet to convince any of their expatriated players and coaches to return during the months since the massive 2014 Chinese shopping spree.

In fact, China's influences are encroaching even further. Incredible Miracle re-qualifying for Champions Korea isn't too surprising—but they're now sponsored by Chinese company Longzhu. New team Anarchy is, like with GE Tigers, yet another competitor outside of KeSPA's aegis of influence, representing another crack in the defenses of Korea's formerly well-reputed corporatized infrastructure.

Is this the end for them? Probably not. Rumors have reached me as to CJ Entus's strengths against even Chinese front-runners, and SKT T1 isn't going to take their loss lying down. But Korea's finding themselves in an interesting position: they may very well be the perceived underdogs versus China come October—a position they haven't experienced since IPL 5.

Either way, this will be a historic summer.