Does Riot have plans to expand eSports competitions/leagues to more regions/countries?
As a Canadian, I love following LCS here and I'm glad to get to watch it. My university recently did a little competition where Riot ended up sponsoring a few Riot cards and sent a few Teemo hats to give out as prizes. This sort of thing is just unbelievably cool to me that players can apply to get help with little competitions.
For Season 4 and beyond, does Riot plan to actually organize any community competitions instead of having the players organize and then sponsor them?
These next few paragraphs are just to help explain what I mean by the question.
What I mean is that most players can only organize small events for a set group of people. Take my university for example. Part of the reason we could do a competition is because the school provided all the laptops to all students through tuition and we could book a large enough room to accommodate around 200 people. This was fun but very messy to participate in since half of people were there to win/play while the other half were joking around, which is fine! For fun competitions are exactly that, really fun to participate in. But competitions that were sponsored for larger prizes than $10 Riot cards or $25 Riot cards for the winners would entice a larger competitive scene.
I live near Toronto where we have a massive population overall and a very healthy amount of League of Legends players. It's large enough that it would be feasible to have a competition within the city/surrounding area and draw well over 200 Gold+ players to participate. The issue then would be finding a space to compete. Which is expensive as hell and all that and I could go on and on about the issues organizing such large events so I'll stop since of all people Riot would know exactly just how hard it is.
This is just a thought for my area. But I am also Peruvian and know there is a huge following of LoL players in Peru as well, filling internet cafes to capacity some nights just to play. Brazil has it's own server now where a lot of the surrounding countries now play but the competitive scene is still contained mostly to Brazil itself.
Will there be more outreach done on Riot's part to bring in more countries into competitive LoL or will it be up to the fans to do the legwork to get things organized before Riot will lend a helping hand in getting things done?
As an aside, I love what has happened in the last year with eSports and the quality/popularity of it. Friends that know nothing of video games whatsoever know about League of Legends and are slowly getting more and more interested in seeing competitive games. That's something no other company has done I think and kudos to Riot for putting in the money to make eSports a growing thing.