Introducing the eSports Amateur League
tldr:
Amateur league for League of Legends. Inspired by CAL. Currently only looking for basic functionality feedback to ensure there's no horrible flaws with what I've got going currently. Can only sign up, create team and invite others to team, currently.
longer:
Hi all, my name Ryan. I love League of Legends and have played it since the friends and family alpha. My account is the 108th account to be created on League, ever. I worked for Riot Games, back in 2011, for one day! I've seen several posts about amateur leagues crop up recently. This is another post about an amateur league. What I'd like to do in this post is introduce this league and explain my vision. I'll wrap up by explaining what I've linked to here today.
This post is a link to the eSports Amateur League ("ESAL"). ESAL is a project that I've been working on for the past six or seven months. It's on Github. ESAL is an amateur league for League of Legends (as well as other games, in the future). I've gone into lengthy detail about my inspiration for ESAL in a post on the site itself, but I'll give a brief overview here. Back in the day, I was captivated by the "scene" that CAL allowed to be built up around itself. I was not aware of organized league play prior to CAL, so finding CAL was an eye opening experience. I got the same satisfaction from playing on an organized team, from CAL, that I did from playing console games with friends in person. That build up and anticipation of a match. The week of practice prior. Memories from CAL are something that still come up in discussion today when talking about Counter-Strike. I miss that. I feel like the growth of World of Warcraft from around 2004 until now and improvement in internet speeds somewhat took the focus away from organized league play and LANs. Obviously leagues and LANs still exist, but somewhere along the way CAL died off and perhaps there was no interest in filling the gap.
I want to try to bring that back. Riot recently killed off ranked 5s. Even prior to that, ranked 5s were not a compelling ranked experience. Even if you considered ranked 5s a compelling experience, there was no consistency amongst the teams you were playing against unless you were at the top percentile of ranked teams. I'm aiming at fixing that. I've created the eSports Amateur League as a place for teams to compete in a single, unified league, against other teams that they see and are familiar with. I want teams to be excited about seeing their season schedule and seeing who they have to go against. ESAL is not a league creation tool or a league that promises to provide casters for every game. ESAL is a single league that you can know that your involvement at one point in time will be recorded forever.
My vision for ESAL is to provide the a consistent platform on which a league can thrive across multiple games. I'm starting with League because that's the game I know and that's the game that I feel like I know what I would want, as a player. If League does well, the system supports multiple games and perhaps ESAL can expand to support more than just League. But, by consistent I mean that I want ESAL to settle on a solid set of rules and a solid understanding of what it means to be a league. I want players to hear ESAL and immedietly understand that if a friend is saying they made it to Invite division in ESAL that it took a lot of work. I want this consistency to span the entire lifetime of ESAL so that players can expect that if they take a break that they can return to the same high quality league as they left. Finally, I want to make sure that everybody understands that ESAL is open to all skill levels. Divisions exist to provide a hard boundary between experience, but players of all skill are welcome to join in on the fun and work their way up.
To wrap up this post, I'd like to explain what I'm linking to today and why. I'm linking to the very first, raw release of this project. The site lacks any fancy visual styles and doesn't put any attention into verbiage, etc. The ESAL website currently only allows users to create an account, create a League of Legends team and invite others to that team. I've got a lot more of the underlying functionlity coded, but as far as this release goes that is all that exists. I'm linking to this today because I want to get this out there right now. I need users to help poke at this and ensure that this core fundamental site structure will work out. Simply hitting the website will help me test against the load issues and browser issues. My database structure is solid and I don't foresee a need to reset the database, meaning that accounts and teams created from this point forward will remain and will not be reset due to testing.
I know this has been long winded, but I want to say that I do thank anybody who helps me test this out. I plan to launch the first season, for League of Legends, soon. We only need a small number of teams to kick off an inaugural season.
Thanks!