I mean Riot notifies you of all games to watch, rewards you for watching and... generally seems to prefer you watch than play. Or is that just me ? :P PS : I posed that on NA because Riot don't care about EUW. PS 2 : after 10 hours . I realized that no Rioter tried to comment and confim. hmmm
The game isnt even fun to watch. Teams are too scared of interacting because one mistake can cost you the game right now.
Isn't it obvious? Riot doesnt give a shit how dog shit it feels to play this game outside a 5v5 premade environment. Their end goal is league to be watched and not to be played apparently or these dipshits on the "design" department would have been fired four seasons ago.
Yeah if only Riots watch reward system worked then maybe
China loves watching the game and esports fuels a lot of Tencent's money from the game, so they focus on that over the actual game.
NA isn't a relevant region anymore, Riot does not care about us.
If that truly is their strategy, then I believe that's a mistake. Because the less I like playing this game, the less I enjoy watching it. And this is coming from someone who was was an unabashed NA fanboy.
I own a bunch of jerseys and t shirts of my favorite LCS teams, but now I feel like a poser to even considering wearing them, because I don't even bother following the standings at this point.
I really wonder how many people out there really enjoy spectating LoL when they aren't enjoying playing it
The rewards is indeed suspiciously high... Guess it fits the awful state of the game, and the fact that they aren't doing much to improve it, but still they "balance" things around pro play.
Advertisements pay more than you, that's why rewards for watching (and costs lol) are going up, and rewards for actually playing have dropped.
The sad truth is, we kind of asked for it to be this way. The fact that stadium tournaments are always sold out and the sheer number of viewers LCS got before watch missions were a thing clearly impacted Riot's decision to invest even more time and effort into feeding LCS to us.
Riot's logic is "Lots of people watch it, so lots of people should watch it." And, sadly, as long as we, the casual playerbase, continue to indulge in this LCS propaganda and continue to buy tickets, buy merch, complete watch "missions" and endorce, praise and idolise the pro players, League will become more and more of a reality show and less of a game for everyone.
Well. I am not going to watch a game that I can't enjoy. I also play it less, but I still do because (and that is a very sad thing) this is one of 2 thing that I am good at. I suck as a human being and I learned how to be good at this game and I suck at other games so I really don't have a choice if it comes to presenting my skill level to somebody.
I mean Riot notifies you of all games to watch, rewards you for watching and... generally seems to prefer you watch than play.
Well yeah. They were actually slow in adapting this and it was a constant source of criticism since Season 2. DOTA gave you prizes for watching. CS:GO gave you prizes. Overwatch did before League did.
As for preference, they don't care. They want you to interact with League. Just watch esports? Cool! Play the game only? Sweet! Do both? Awesome! But interaction is key.
It's extremely possible to both watch and play.
Some people (myself included) have multiple screens and often have something playing in the background when they play any video game. My second screen is basically dedicated to either a twitch stream or some sort of movie/show while I do my main thing (be it work or games) on my larger screen.
At this point that's what makes them more money, game is dying , quality is only going down, people are losing interest, their only standing content is their tournaments. That's the only place the game seems to be decent and it's just an illusion , it sucks even there.
Too bad the company changed and ruined the game slowly, i used to love and respect this game.
I think they encourage both about equally. Though watching pro play hasn't been as encouraged as much until recently. I don't think it's a bad thing, because Pro Play is another main source of League and Riot's income.
With the addition of Pro View, It's simply a smart business move to want players to watch Esports.
There are a lot of extremely negative people in the comments and I question whether any of them have even watched a professional League game within the last 2 years. [poppy-wink]
Edit: You also have to realise that we recently had MSI, and LCS is going on right now. LCS is arguably one of the biggest Esports events outside of Worlds and Dota International, why would they want you to watch?
They make more money from advertisements than they do from skin sales (assuming every player watches the ads)
Reeses and Statefarm agree :)[slayer-jinx-wink]
Isn't the game mostly balanced around that?
Is it just me or does the website not even work anyway, the video overlaps everything and buttons dont do anything
They also notify you of rewards for playing...
[{quoted}](name=QuM1tSuk3 YT,realm=EUW,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=NNcsvtOv,comment-id=,timestamp=2019-06-09T13:11:03.126+0000)
PS 2 : after 10 hours . I realized that no Rioter tried to comment and confim. hmmm
No Riot comment because you need to use common sense, they want you to play and watch, playing is more important than watching. How do you want them to tell you to play??? Popup notifications on your desktop saying LONG TIME SINCE YOU OPENED LEAGUE COME AND PLAY. They do this by email if your account hasn't been active for a long time.
Watching the game keeps you invested and makes you excited to play doing both is great, but if you play league there's a high chance you play league, amazing right? Not a high chance you watch league, especially esports, advertise things that need to be advertised.
We get rewards for playing the game also in case you haven't caught on. How does this have 44 upvotes
On the in-client news tab, there are 8 news, 5 of them are about pro play. Wait till Qiyana becomes old news so they can bring them back to the overview page.
Well, Riot as a company has to make sure it survives. Drawing viewers will help the game survive. We trash on Riot all the time but a free to play game has to have some way of making money. That's why they make skins, and hextech crafting, other things to pay for, etc. So when they make ANOTHER Lux skin, it's for money. However, they genuinely do try to make the game fun to play. They give you watch rewards and stuff because there's a GIANT FANBASE for it, and having a pro scene is healthy for the game's lifespan. They want to satisfy the viewerbase, and also give missions for people to search out and do. Missions are typically a fun thing and they want to encourage watching the pro scene. It's not like they don't want you to play the game, but they are encouraging watching as well.
Edit: Making money as a company is not a bad thing. If they are trying to use that money to go into other things, such as branching out or advertising, paying their employees and hiring more people to get a better game out there, with more exciting new champions or reworks, balancing, etc. They are trying their hardest, even though a lot of people shit on them. And I'm gonna get shit on for this post with downvotes of people who simply thing "grrr Riot bad company >:(", but the truth of the matter is that all of those people who downvote with no response know that I'm right. lol. But if you wanna discuss this, go ahead, type some shit out, I'll read it and we can discuss!
Well yeah, viewership is more profitable.
No bandwidth consumption and more money.
They use viewership to drive more people to play the game. Riot’s financial model depends on players actually playing the game. They don’t monetize viewership as much as they do skins.
With all of these event passes they keep peddling I’m sure they want both.
Other games have been rewarding people for watching pro matches for years now. People actually asked for watch reward missions. You just didn't see that here because the Boards view the LCS as some kind of evil money printing machine that is responsible for all balance issues.
Is it just me or does Riot prefer we watch rather than play the game ?
Briefly put: yes. It's "their" safest source of revenue.
On paper, "they" can earn quite a lot without having to invest virtually anything in e-sports. The game inspires enough players to waste their early adulthoods gaining sufficient skill to produce games that a small audience worldwide finds entertaining to watch. (That small audience is pretty large in absolute numbers). Most of the total capital is fronted by other people: for free in the case of players (human capital); and as ordinary business, in the case of partners etc.
I mean, they even selectively open up special game modes to pro play during events with large audiences. The community may gripe ("why open URF to LCS but not to everyone else?"), but the loss of real goodwill isn't detected or recorded on the balance sheet by anyone at Riot/TenCent.
just you lol, if you dont want to watch dont watch but its only natural for a company to incentivize watching their game much the same way they do for you to play their game with the various events and rewards you get for playing
The company wants you to watch the games because it actually gives them big bucks from sponsors. You playing doesn't actually help them directly.
True. The last time when it was still possible to both watch and play was when tank tops were viable ( and by viable I mean in term of enduring damage, not dealing damage). The game was much less snowballing than it is at the moment.
I never watch those missions even though they reward you with Blue Essence. Unfortunately, it is one of the very few ways of getting that currency.
They also balance the game mostly around pro-play being fun to watch, hence damage doesn't get decreased.
Frustrating as fuck.
But the pro games have not been that fun to watch :-(
Boards posts that don't have a clearly relevant issue related to the in-game (or in-lore, if you're in the story section) state of the game generally don't get replied to, from my experience. You're not going to have some Riot employee coming over and explaining to you their complicated philosophy of trying to addict players to play their game, because chances are real high that most Riot employees are just regular dudes, dudettes, and other identifying individuals who want to make parts of video games. Those are the types of people you'll have actually responding to posts, and they'll respond to the things they know about and want to talk about, not weird conspiracy theories that may or may not be true and they have little to no influence in.
They want you to do both. Watching the pros play may give you aspirations and thus incentive to keep playing. They also likely sell more skins when pros use certain ones. On top of that, they have been doing other things like buying icons to support the teams.
The answer is both.
Esport earns nore cash for them. We customers are only shits for them - just look at game balance. Everything is for esport
