LCS Minor League?

Shadowatom·May 26, 2016·3 votes·859 views

With 3 out of the 6 Challenger series spots in NA being made into basically minor league teams for LCS teams, should Riot start thinking about creating some sort of off league for LCS team subs to scrim against each other similar to the LSPL in China? The Challenger Series is obviously meant to be a gate for upcoming stars, but the fact that Cloud 9's challenger team, made up of LCS level players, bought Enemy's spot and beat the heck out of their opponents in the Challenger Qualifier matches, it seems like a poor idea to allow LCS teams to stick around in the Challenger Series for much longer since it cuts the competition down. Especially when you consider that they'll just sell the LCS spot when they manage to qualify and keep all the players, leaving nothing for the new organization other than whatever free agents other teams happened to drop in the off-season. Just an idea considering Apex, Cloud 9, Team Liquid are taking half the spots and I know at least CLG and Fnatic have Challenger teams too, and I'm sure there's several more that I'm unaware of.

2 Comments

Ale non è maleMay 27, 20161 votes

Fnatic Academy team got beaten handily in EUCS Qualifier, mousesports that is a long standing esports org and was in EUCS last splt got eliminated too (waiting to see what will happen to the other team in EUCS in previous split in SK Gaming vs Team Forge final on one side of the bracket) The problem is that in NA there is a complete lack of a undergound of competitive tournaments when amateur teams with some new talent can grow their infrastructure and organization and improve to beat a team with a solid organization behind them, but that's not something that riot can directly address by theirselves

The third party organizers have to step up on this to create an environment when an amateur/semi pro team can eventually step up in competition and be prepared to beat an estabilished org

Ale non è maleMay 28, 20161 votes

And SK went down too with Team Forge winning the EUCS qualifier finals!!!

Basically the 3 biggest/ longstanding orgs that were in EUCS Qualifier got defeated and a completely brand new org + the former Renegades Banditos with no more support from their parent org (because of the consequences of the whole REN thing) got through into EUCS - and Banditos when supported officially by renegades didn't make through in Spring Qualifier either - Heck, in thefinals vs Misfits there was a minor German org, so only 1 big/historic org made it through the top 4 of the EUCS qualifier tournament

Heck, G2 had their academy team into the tournament too - even though they were not supposed to fight for the EUCS spots as they were a roster genuinely built for acedmy purposes and made to compete in spanish local tournaments, so technically there are 4 big orgs that were beaten by a roster assembled by an org that doesn't support them anymore ( Misfits, former REN:Banditos) and especially by a brand new org (Team Forge)

For EU at least, you can't turn EUCS in a franchised league, it just would not be coherent with the competition that has historically gone beyond and below the CS level

IN NA, you can consider it if you decide that you can't really push a step up in third party tournament organization and in the development of a bigger scene below CS that is not artificially aided by Riot theirselves - Riot are trying with the uLOL project but quite honestly that is not the direction to go since it leave unsolved the problem of what these teams are gonna do in the transition between the uLoL level and the level required to get in CS/LCS both as funding and as organization point of view -