There's been a lot of disgruntled murmurs about the current state of professional League of Legends. The laneswaps, the tower pushes, the decided lack of fighting... it all adds up to a fairly dismal viewing experience for the long-term fan. Esports' selling points are, after all, intrinsically tied to action: ace players styling on others, wombo combos locking entire teams up in a mess of pyrotechnics. It's much easier to appreciate a hard-won battle than it is to respect the calculations and intricate mind games involved in what is generally known as "macro play".

But while the lion's share of the blame is directed at lane swaps and the non-interaction they foster, the idea that they should be designed away with is preposterous. Laneswapping isn't inherently a problem—rather, it acts as an enabler for a much healthier state of the game. Champions and strategies that would otherwise wither and die in the laning phase are made viable by good map play.

Conversely, though, there are team compositions that do want those direct matchups. And it is true that the current state of the game has leaned too far away from them. But the solution isn't to beef up towers, or to get rid of Zz'rot Portal, or the various other suggestions meant to directly cripple laneswapping as a viable strategy. It's better to understand that the intense focus on strategic swapping is symptomatic of more fundamental issues with this season's design.

Risk/reward ratios

Pro play is all about min-maxing—you want maximum reward for minimal risk, because the other way around loses you games. Yes, exceptions exist within the combat-happy LPL, but IEM Katowice conclusively demonstrated that even the best Chinese teams, experts in the 5v5 brawl, will fall apart if you play the game more like Baduk than Rock'em Sock'em Robots, focusing more on map control than kill bounties.

It is, after all, safer and less risky to farm up gold by knocking over towers and minions than it is by risking your own life for a kill. Ironically, increasing the amount of gold per kill only further discourages fights between pro players—getting 500 or more per head sounds nice on paper, but you have to be absolutely sure that you're not giving up the same, as recovering from giving up an increased kill bounty gets harder and harder.

This was as true in season 2 as it was in seasons 4 and 6, so why was it that teams back then were a lot more willing to brawl? It's not that their understanding of the game was that much cruder back then, but a difference in gold-sourcing compared to then and now.

Neutral objectives have two things going for them: one, you can't hide behind minion lines to go after them, and two, you need to invest heavily in wards to be able to see threats around you while you take them, which indirectly blinds you to threats in other parts of the map. As a result, going for neutrals means risking fights—and so the reward for doing so was equal to the risk taken. The Dragon objective is meant to do just that, but it's lately been a lot less tempting now that they removed the one feature that made it such a hotly-contested objective in prior years: gold.

Yes, the dragon stacks are useful, and a team with five is almost insurmountable in fights—but when itemization is the number one factor in a team's success, it's no wonder that teams would much rather farm towers than hunt lizards. The same problem afflicts Rift Herald as well—yes, it helps teams push lanes and take towers too, which would on paper suggest that the Herald's a high-priority objective. But between the high damage it applies to its attackers and the inherent risk in going after neutral objectives, it actually isn't worth risking giving up gold to the enemy team to prioritize it.

While both Dragon and Rift Herald are at least safer sources of indirect value than going one-on-one with an enemy player, the overwhelming importance of itemization makes indirect value the same as worthless.

Waiting around

It's not just the lack of gold to scrabble over, of course. Compounding the risk side of the ratio is the direct cost of dying at all. Thanks to the reworked respawn timers, fights in the mid-game are a lot more conclusive than on prior patches—and this was probably the biggest design mistake so far this year.

A dead player doesn't just reward bounty gold to the enemy team. In a lot of the recent fights, a single player's death can snowball out of control—their removed presence means their team can't keep the victors of a single fight from knocking over two or three towers immediately after, cementing a permanent map-wide advantage.

This only further incentivizes teams to stay the hell away from each other. The hit-and-run map play strategies also have that going for them: if you can't take the turret right away, it's good enough that you landed a few autoattacks on it. Your team can move elsewhere, slowly grinding away each open turret one hit at a time until something finally crumbles—either the turrets themselves, or the enemy team's patience.

If that sounds incredibly boring to watch, it is. But it's either this or win and lose by the coinflip that a full 5v5 brawl effectively amounts to.

Uptempo

The good news is, the fixes for the current problems in League as a spectator esport are fairly simple. It isn't just a matter of reverting changes made either—the death timer situation, for example, might be a massive snowball, but so was the old Dragon's ambient team gold. In the case of neutral objectives, it's enough to make the gold bounty "localized," or basically rewarding only those that contributed directly to taking it down.

That in itself would force interesting decision trees onto teams. While the pre-eminent importance of gold drive them to the objective, having all five of them on-location to enjoy the bounty risks giving up control over the rest of the map. Similarly, not having all of them in attendance greatly increases the odds of an ambush.

The conflict is made even greater if the exact same localized gold values are applied to Rift Herald as well as the Dragon, as it'd then double the neutral objectives teams need to control—an incredibly difficult proposition given the hard limit on wards they can push onto the map. It'd straight-up double the ambush opportunities for either side as a result.

But all of that would be meaningless if Riot doesn't do at least one reversion: the length of mid-game death timers. This, too, has a gold cost attached: exactly equal to the items and base stats of the player knocked out and unable to defend. For the sake of spectator-friendliness, it'd probably be best if players were actually allowed to play the game.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

A relatively quiet weekend, this, as everybody in esports is tired out after a busy week of being fired. Haha! A topical lie. There's still top-level CS:GO season play to catch, the best Hearthstone in the Americas, and the ongoing drama of the international League of Legends scene. Details, timings and stream links below. If we've missed anything, let us know in the comments so that I don't get fired. Have a great weekend!

Hearthstone: Americas Winter Championship

The first of three international Hearthstone championships running in March, over the next two days the best players in the Americas will do wizard poker at one another for a shot at the World Championship and a slice of $100,000. Play begins at 10:00 PST (18:00 GMT) each day and you can find the stream here.

CS:GO: ESL Pro League Season 3

Ongoing season play between some of the best CS:GO teams in the world, streamed throughout the weekend. One notable matchup is Astralis vs. EnVyUs at 09:00 PST/17:00 GMT on Saturday. You can also expect Virtus.pro, G2 Esports and others. Play begins at 09:00 PST/17:00 GMT on each day and runs for around 12 hours. Find it all on the official ESL stream.

League of Legends: NA LCS, Korean LCK, Chinese LPL

As the dust settles on IEM Katowice, the international LoL season enters one of its busiest weekends. There are games happening all over the world - if you're willing to split your time between different leagues then you can start off with Korea's LCK on Saturday (starting at 00:00 PST/08:00 GMT) or even China's LPL if you're willing to get up early in Europe (games start at 21:00 PST/05:00 GMT). Then you've got time for a nap before the NA LCS kicks off at 12:00 PST/20:00 GMT. Play continues into Sunday in China and North America - check out LoLesports for a full schedule and livestream.

Dota 2: Fnatic vs. First Departure, WePlay Season 3 SEA

There's not a great deal of Dota 2 on this weekend, but the Shanghai Major proved that it's well worth keeping an eye on the South East Asian scene. With that in mind, you can catch Fnatic vs. First Departure at 05:00 PST/13:00 GMT on Saturday via the JoinDota Twitch channel.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

IEM Katowice's League of Legends program went roughly as expected. There were two notable surprises: Fnatic did much better than their EU LCS form would have suggested, while Counter Logic Gaming's individual weaknesses were exposed in turn. But it settled out as everybody predicted: SKT T1 had another perfect run through another international tournament—the second time that they've managed to do so despite struggling to stay playoffs-viable back home in South Korea. North America, of course, was the whipping post for the international assembly.

But the interesting thing is that they weren't alone. Arguably, they weren't even the worst. As much of a joke as North American teams are in an international context, at least they're willing to laugh along to some extent—in China's case, everybody's awkwardly trying not to stare.

Since late 2012 China has been considered the second-strongest region in the world of competitive League of Legends. The winners of IPL 5, the gung-ho hyper-aggressive "freight train" that gave even SKT T1 K in 2013 a bump, so on and so forth: they've earned the respect of the world through the virtue of being the most entertaining region to watch. Though the Koreans' immaculate strategic perfection would have them take home the trophy time and again, everybody nonetheless appreciated the gusto and fearlessness that Chinese teams would bring to the table.

Since last Worlds, however, all that has seemingly deflated. And it isn't just in League of Legends. Whether at Dota 2's Shanghai Major or halfway across the continent at IEM Katowice, China's esports programs have reached an unexpectedly ubiquitous nadir. What the heck happened to an entire continent of players?

Losing the arms race

The most obvious issue with Chinese esports is that they're woefully out of date. Excuses have been cobbled together to try and explain it—Tencent was notorious for pushing live patches late, occasionally making it so that Chinese teams have to fight in metagames they haven't practiced on a professional level. However, scrutiny quickly dispels the myth: at least with Katowice, they've had at least as much time as the Korean teams. In fact, eastern practices are largely homogenized: the top Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese teams have publicly acknowledged each other as scrim partners, and it is common practice for players to log on the Korean solo queue ladder as a way to sharpen their skills.

Besides, even China knows that their strategic deficit isn't based on the latest patch, but stemming back all the way to late last year—and possibly earlier.

As translated by Goldper10 author Hodeken, LMS caster Clement Chu was able to interview Edward Gaming coach Ji "Aaron" Xing after Worlds 2015. And Aaron's summation of the state of the Chinese game still stands:

"...this kind of play style has actually been pretty commonplace in Europe before. Perhaps it's because Western teams thought that they could not get an advantage in a direct matchup with the Asian teams so they put a lot more effort in planning and strategy. Especially their wave management and timing of when to push down turrets, which explains why they prioritize champions with good wave-clear and the teleporter mid lane."

That exact pattern of behavior expressed itself half a year later at Katowice: CLG's beautifully coherent macro play, centered around tandem plays with Darshan's splitpushes, was exposed under international pressure as a means of alleviating attention from mid laner Huhi and AD carry Stixxay. Against a team of similarly developed macro strategies, those weaknesses proved fatal thanks to the extended mid-game respawn timers this year. But even while losing, they were at least able to catch people off-guard, even pushing deep into SKT T1's side of the map.

And what about teams that haven't developed anti-splitpush strategies at all? Then the inverse was true. No matter how well Royal Never Give Up played in skirmishes, they ultimately had to ironically give up when even their best fights netted them zero turrets and lost buffs. Same with QG Reapers, who were blown out of the water by a resurgent and increasingly confident Fnatic—QG had absolutely no idea how or when to play around Rekkles's Jhin, losing fights before they even knew they started as soon as Jhin's ultimate was off cooldown.

China came in expecting a knife fight. What they got, instead, was a Cold War of manipulations and maneuverings.

Weapons development

You would think that if Edward Gaming's coach could accurately identify China's weak points, then the entire region must surely be busy solving it. And it's an assumption further fueled by the eyewateringly large amounts of money that China has flung at top South Korean talent for two years running. Yet that raises only more questions.

The Korean coaches hired to help develop LPL teams used to play on LCK teams that did just fine with their macro play. If nothing else, it's inconceivable for them to have effected zero change within the teams they now guide, given the stark differences in Korean and Chinese play styles—yet where is it actually expressed?

Of the Chinese teams at Katowice, both have Korean coaching staff. Of the two, only QG have really developed a map play strategy for regular LPL use—one that actually stands in interesting contrast to the Western style by deliberately losing a side tower early so that AD carry Peco can then freeze the minion waves and spend the rest of the game farming passively.

It was also a style abandoned entirely at Poland, as Peco was swapped out for Uzi instead—and Uzi is the last player to send 20 minutes passively last-hitting. Royal fared better in Group A, stomping through both Origen and Ever—expected wins, given both teams were struggling for relevance back home. But against Fnatic, who had polished up surprisingly nicely by the playoff brackets, they were quickly outmaneuvered. Jungler Mlxg, top laner Looper, support player Mata: these are all extremely well-respected names, and the tournament clearly demonstrated their individual skills. But individual mechanics amount for little when your entire team's positioning had been carefully predicted and manipulated into Rekkles's gunsights.

For Chinese League of Legends to reclaim even a shadow of their former respect, two things should be considered. One, pay whatever amount of money it takes to drag Aaron out of temporary retirement, as he seems even now to be the only coach with the insight to recognize the weaknesses in the Chinese style of play—and, crucially, was the man to defang Faker's LeBlanc last year. Two: to stop hiring foreign players and staff entirely.

The problem with strategies like CLG's splitpush is that it requires a level of communicative fluency that might simply be impossible for Chinese teams as they are. Not necessarily between the players, mind you—in-game, shotcalling and timers are usually reduced to short-syllable names, timestamps and pings. Generally, when you're busy with skirmishes, the shotcaller isn't making a long-winded spiel about how they should approach the next fight.

Outside of the game, though, when the coach and players are discussing strategy, mutual fluency is a much bigger deal. The ability to explain the hows and whys they should approach a game in a certain way, and especially how to time itemization with map movements, is already difficult enough when you share the same language (so difficult that Origen still hasn't settled on a coach). Having a live-in interpreter can only help up to the point where jargon and game slang start to muddy the waters. Heck, TheScore's Kelsey Moser has had trouble finding anybody that can translate "split push" into Chinese in the first place—and it's a good question whether it's simply because the interpreter didn't know the words for it, or if there is actually a linguistic void for the concept among Chinese esports.

That's slightly unfair in the sense that Snake clearly knows what it is and practices it regularly. But Snake isn't QG Reapers, and isn't Royal Never Give Up. There needs to be more than one Chinese team diligently practicing complex strategies against each other—losing and winning in turn, testing and refining their approaches with every iterative game. And they need to be good enough that it's clear to the rest of the scene that the effort isn't wasteful.

If they can't figure that out by the summer split, then forget about October. Might as well give their Worlds seeds to Taiwan instead, just a hundred miles off the coast, and save on the heartbreak.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

There are two fun things about being on two different power ranking panels: one, to see how community figures talk about teams and players behind closed doors and a signed NDA (the specifics of which I can't go into detail on—I signed it too).

The second fun thing is comparing what goes on within those closed discussioned with the wild speculation that power rankings conjure from the audience as a whole.

Yes, it's true—bias exists. Though never quite in the form the audience assumes it does, nor from the panelist they think it comes from (unless it's an LMS team suspiciously far up—I take full credit and/or blame for that). To shed the tiniest amount of light on an otherwise deliberately obscure process: favoritism for any one team or region is usually the most erroneous audience assumption. Rather than jockeying with each other for the chance to increase their region's prestige, regional panelists tend to be the most critical of their teams—after all, nobody knows their flaws and shortcomings better (which is why COUGAR E-Sports will remain dead last so long as I draw breath).

There's even a tiny amount of envy involved when the international comparisons are made. Just as the grass is always greener on the other side, so is the team-fighting better coordinated, the individual mechanics sharper, and the map play more strategically sound. Furthermore, comparative strengths are cast in the context of prior tournament winners—most of which have been Korean, which admittedly sets an extremely high standard across the board.

The biggest contention right now, with IEM starting this week, is whether the Chinese teams—and QG Reapers in particular—have been given a fair shake. If you've been watching the LPL, they mostly have.

Hitting the weak point

Chinese team QG Reapers, as with the Immortals, ROX Tigers, and ahq e-Sports Club, went the first half of the spring split without dropping a single set. In fact, unlike the ROX Tigers, they didn't even drop a /game/ among their sets until fairly recently. Cast in the context of China's stereotypically hyperviolent and extremely volatile metagame, a team has to be something extraordinary indeed to achieve such consistency—or, alternatively, there has to be a crucial region-wide habit that they're uniquely exploiting.

In China's case, their regional preference for heavy brawling, originally a characteristic of the once overwhelmingly dominant OMG, makes for a primitive map control game. Historically, their most impressive international performances have come as a result of forcing an emphasis on mechanics: the 4v0 lanes of Worlds 2013, for instance, isn't some great feat of strategic timing and canny scouting—it simply forces teams to either fight China on their own terms, or give up free map gold. Uzi, the single most successful Chinese player in terms of international results, built his fame off of 2v2 outplays and gung-ho dueling.

QG's strategies this year are the polar opposite of that traditional style: instead of relying on early-game power spikes, they vastly prefer scaling options like Viktor and Ezreal and forcing laneswaps—all the better to feed AD carry Peco with. They'll deliberately allow a team to take the turret out from under Peco so that the minion wave can be frozen on their side of the map, allowing their carries to farm up until later in the game, neutralizing their rivals' aggressive strategies while giving them a significant advantage when the death timers are longer.

In short, QG is the only Chinese team playing to the current meta, and their losses so far have been a result of switching away from that—it's not that Uzi sucks now that he's on QG, but that his early-game strengths are actually a liability under the team's current strategy. Yet it's this same strength that has them rated so unfavorably when compared abroad.

Frontrunner fallacy

The problem is that everybody else has been playing the laneswap meta for ages now, and QG's actually looks pretty bad in comparison. The lane freeze to pump Peco full of steroids isn't flawless: team strategies based less around seeking advantages through team fights and more about taking turrets, for instance, leaves QG trying to defend objectives at a numerical disadvantage against teams that are increasingly using double (or even triple) AD carry compositions. Not only do turrets tend to fall extremely quickly when everybody's building some form of attack speed, but that also neatly neutralizes QG's scaling advantages too.

The tower emphasis compounds QG's issues as well. Current laneswap strategies are based on tower trades in quick succession to stay on top of each other's global gold—a stark contrast to QG's freeze method. While the Chinese style does make for one extremely fed carry, it indirectly starves everybody else on the team—and 4v5 fights are extremely unpleasant when you're not just lacking a player, but also collectively down an item compared to your counterparts.

The most extreme version of this: Counter Logic Gaming, whose Darshan vs The World strategy has made them the west's highest authority on how to play the 4v4 and 4v5 game to near-perfection. CLG's splitpush timing is something that QG has never had to deal with before—simultaneous objective prioritization designed to stretch them across the map and allow Darshan's dueling champion to pick fights with Peco at will. And Peco isn't going to be winning mid- and late-game fights into Quinn or Fiora. But at least CLG offers some hope that QG can find and outplay individual players to take the pressure off—Huhi and Stixxay, in particular, are the most exploitable vulnerabilities on the North American team's roster.

Less hope exists in the face of SKT T1, even as the Korean team struggles domestically. Blank replacing Bengi for IEM may or may not be an issue—but outplaying Faker has historically been presumptuous at best, and SKT T1 has proven before that their struggles at home doesn't stop them from flawlessly sweeping international tournaments.

That does raise an important question: what would it take for QG, and China by extension, to be warranted more competitive merit? And the answer to that is "pulling an OMG." Just as OMG's 2013 dominance left a permanent mark on the character of Chinese League of Legends, QG's current dominance should by all rights force teams to (eventually) adapt to them. Their expected failures at IEM will provide a playbook for that purposes—and set the foundation for China's Worlds bid in October.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

There are two fun things about being on two different power ranking panels: one, to see how community figures talk about teams and players behind closed doors and a signed NDA (the specifics of which I can't go into detail on—I signed it too).

The second fun thing is comparing what goes on within those closed discussioned with the wild speculation that power rankings conjure from the audience as a whole.

Yes, it's true—bias exists. Though never quite in the form the audience assumes it does, nor from the panelist they think it comes from (unless it's an LMS team suspiciously far up—I take full credit and/or blame for that). To shed the tiniest amount of light on an otherwise deliberately obscure process: favoritism for any one team or region is usually the most erroneous audience assumption. Rather than jockeying with each other for the chance to increase their region's prestige, regional panelists tend to be the most critical of their teams—after all, nobody knows their flaws and shortcomings better (which is why COUGAR E-Sports will remain dead last so long as I draw breath).

There's even a tiny amount of envy involved when the international comparisons are made. Just as the grass is always greener on the other side, so is the team-fighting better coordinated, the individual mechanics sharper, and the map play more strategically sound. Furthermore, comparative strengths are cast in the context of prior tournament winners—most of which have been Korean, which admittedly sets an extremely high standard across the board.

The biggest contention right now, with IEM starting this week, is whether the Chinese teams—and QG Reapers in particular—have been given a fair shake. If you've been watching the LPL, they mostly have.

Hitting the weak point

Chinese team QG Reapers, as with the Immortals, ROX Tigers, and ahq e-Sports Club, went the first half of the spring split without dropping a single set. In fact, unlike the ROX Tigers, they didn't even drop a game among their sets until fairly recently. Cast in the context of China's stereotypically hyperviolent and extremely volatile metagame, a team has to be something extraordinary indeed to achieve such consistency—or, alternatively, there has to be a crucial region-wide habit that they're uniquely exploiting.

In China's case, their regional preference for heavy brawling, originally a characteristic of the once overwhelmingly dominant OMG, makes for a primitive map control game. Historically, their most impressive international performances have come as a result of forcing an emphasis on mechanics: the 4v0 lanes of Worlds 2013, for instance, isn't some great feat of strategic timing and canny scouting—it simply forces teams to either fight China on their own terms, or give up free map gold. Uzi, the single most successful Chinese player in terms of international results, built his fame off of 2v2 outplays and gung-ho dueling.

QG's strategies this year are the polar opposite of that traditional style: instead of relying on early-game power spikes, they vastly prefer scaling options like Viktor and Ezreal and forcing laneswaps—all the better to feed AD carry Peco with. They'll deliberately allow a team to take the turret out from under Peco so that the minion wave can be frozen on their side of the map, allowing their carries to farm up until later in the game, neutralizing their rivals' aggressive strategies while giving them a significant advantage when the death timers are longer.

In short, QG is the only Chinese team playing to the current meta, and their losses so far have been a result of switching away from that—it's not that Uzi sucks now that he's on QG, but that his early-game strengths are actually a liability under the team's current strategy. Yet it's this same strength that has them rated so unfavorably when compared abroad.

Frontrunner fallacy

The problem is that everybody else has been playing the laneswap meta for ages now, and QG's actually looks pretty bad in comparison. The lane freeze to pump Peco full of steroids isn't flawless: team strategies based less around seeking advantages through team fights and more about taking turrets, for instance, leaves QG trying to defend objectives at a numerical disadvantage against teams that are increasingly using double (or even triple) AD carry compositions. Not only do turrets tend to fall extremely quickly when everybody's building some form of attack speed, but that also neatly neutralizes QG's scaling advantages too.

The tower emphasis compounds QG's issues as well. Current laneswap strategies are based on tower trades in quick succession to stay on top of each other's global gold—a stark contrast to QG's freeze method. While the Chinese style does make for one extremely fed carry, it indirectly starves everybody else on the team—and 4v5 fights are extremely unpleasant when you're not just lacking a player, but also collectively down an item compared to your counterparts.

The most extreme version of this: Counter Logic Gaming, whose Darshan vs The World strategy has made them the west's highest authority on how to play the 4v4 and 4v5 game to near-perfection. CLG's splitpush timing is something that QG has never had to deal with before—simultaneous objective prioritization designed to stretch them across the map and allow Darshan's dueling champion to pick fights with Peco at will. And Peco isn't going to be winning mid- and late-game fights into Quinn or Fiora. But at least CLG offers some hope that QG can find and outplay individual players to take the pressure off—Huhi and Stixxay, in particular, are the most exploitable vulnerabilities on the North American team's roster.

Less hope exists in the face of SKT T1, even as the Korean team struggles domestically. Blank replacing Bengi for IEM may or may not be an issue—but outplaying Faker has historically been presumptuous at best, and SKT T1 has proven before that their struggles at home doesn't stop them from flawlessly sweeping international tournaments.

That does raise an important question: what would it take for QG, and China by extension, to be warranted more competitive merit? And the answer to that is "pulling an OMG." Just as OMG's 2013 dominance left a permanent mark on the character of Chinese League of Legends, QG's current dominance should by all rights force teams to (eventually) adapt to them. Their expected failures at IEM will provide a playbook for that purposes—and set the foundation for China's Worlds bid in October.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

It's all kicking off this weekend, with a Dota Major underway and a CS:GO Major undergoing its final qualifiers. There s also Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone and Smite to watch and another week of international League of Legends to take in. If the year s been a little quiet so far, that s certainly coming to an abrupt end. If your Dota 2 casters seem a little quiet, however, that s an entirely separate technical problem.

Dota 2: The Shanghai Major group stage

The Major has been off to a strange start, with solid games—and one amazing underdog story—fighting against production problems and the abrupt loss of a panel host. Even so, this is the event in the Dota circuit right now, and the weekend will see the remaining games in the group stage. Tune in on Saturday to see if Frankfurt champs OG can repeat their success in Shanghai. Sunday will see one of the most hotly-contested groups as coL, EG, VP and Liquid duke it out. The stream begins at 09:00 BJT (01:00 GMT/17:00 PST the previous day) and runs for ages. The schedule has been flexible, to say the least, but you can find hypothetical start times here.

Heroes of the Storm: NA Spring Regional

The region's best teams fight for a share of $100,000 and a spot at the Spring Championship in Korea. This is one of the highest-profile events of the HotS calendar so far this year, so makes for a good opportunity to take the scene's temperature—much as Hearthstone's own Americas championship was last week. Games start at 10:00 PST/18:00 GMT each day and you can find the stream here.

Hearthstone: PGL Spring Tavern Tales 2016

$25,000 on the line for some of Europe's best Hearthstone players as 32 of them descend on Bucharest. It'll start with a Swiss group stage followed by single-elimination playoffs for the top 16. The games started today, and will continue throughout the weekend. Play begins at 09:30 GMT/01:30 PST and continues through the evening. Find the stream here.

League of Legends: NA LCS and LPL

Another weekend, another chance to keep tabs on the dominant teams in the US and China ahead of the upcoming Mid-Season Invitational. You can read James Chen's assessment of how each scene is doing here, and find details on schedules—as well as the livestream—on the official LoLesports site.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: MLG Columbus 2016 Main Qualifier

While the top eight for MLG Columbus 2016 is drawn from the world's best-regarded teams, a further eight have a chance to shore up their qualification hopes this weekend. This is the first CS:GO Major to offer the new prize pool of $1,000,000—a massive increase for a scene that was previously capping out at around $250,000. Play starts at around 12:00 EST (17:00 GMT/09:00 PST) each day, and you can find the stream here.

Smite: Spring Split Relegations

Smite is currently going through a multi-phase relegation process to determine which teams advanced to play in the Pro League proper later in the year. This weekend will see phase two play out in Europe and North America, as the winners of the open bracket—players like you or I, but better—face existing Challenger Cup teams for a coveted spot in the big leagues. Games start at 13:00 EST (18:00 GMT/10:00 PST) each day on the official Smite Twitch stream.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

Sometimes you need to step away from the PC and get some fresh air, which is hard because then you can't play video games. Riot Games is aware of this conundrum and has worked to make it a bit easier, with the release of a special League of Legends smartphone application called League Friends.

You can't play League of Legends with it, but there are a bunch of other useful features for people who take the game seriously. You're able to chat with people in your LoL friend list, and you can receive push notifications when someone has invited you to join a game. That's a pretty small offering, but Riot plans to expand its functionality as time goes on, presumably (or hopefully) with all manner of esports related stats. 

The app is now available in North America and Oceania, with other regions to follow shortly after. You'll need either iOS 8.3 or Android 4.1.1 (or newer iterations of these) to run it.