The importance of the Wildcard regions. In your article, include an introduction to League of Legends or we say LOL Esports, a brief history of the Wildcard regions and why they are essential in the growth of esports, what you think is next for these regions, and more.
Table of Contents
Introduction to LOL Esports:
League of Legends (LOL Esports) was released on October 27th, 2009, by Riot Games. It is a MOBA game with an estimated player base of over 100 million players. As the game’s goal, two teams fight to destroy each other’s nexus (basically their base) by controlling paths on the map called “lanes” and collecting resources that are converted into units that assist your team in destroying your enemy’s base.
League of Legends was inspired by the Warcraft 3 map “Defense of the Ancients,” more commonly known as DotA. This opened up opportunities for professional players to play at eSports tournaments in 2010. League of Legends also has an annual world championship called Worlds hosted by Riot Games and starts with qualifiers from all over the world, then continues with regional tournaments. The winning teams from each regional tournament are then invited to the World Championship to face other regions.
Talking about the History of LOL Esports:
The first southeast Asian, Oceania, and Taiwan(OCE/TW) LOL Esports were established in 2012, known as the “Garena Premier League.” This started small but quickly gained popularity and, at the beginning of 2014, expanded to include a second league, “Garena Premier League – Challenger Series,” which was open for any challenger teams.
In early 2015, the format changed to a round-robin group stage where each team faces every other team once, and at the end of that stage top 4 moves into playoffs, then finals.
With this format, Garena hosted the first-ever “wildcard” regions (The Wildcard Regions of LOL eSports Scene) at Worlds. The team that qualified first was the Bangkok Titans, and after them, it was the Singapore Sentinels. Both teams lost in the quarter-finals and got ranked 5th-8th place. After that, the Turkish team Aces High finished 3rd-4th place.
Wildcard regions were vital because they showed how much potential these teams had and proved that they could compete on a world stage, which opened up more opportunities to other regions in the future.
What would be he future of LOL Esports:
The southeast Asian LOL esports scene has grown significantly over the past years, with more and more teams improving their gameplay. Performances like these show that they are not far off from challenging other international regions. After the performance at Worlds last year, many fans were hyped after seeing what SAW (SEA’s Wildcard region) could do at a world tournament and hoped to see them compete at the next one as well.
However, it is questionable whether they will be able to attend Worlds again in 2016 because there haven’t been any updates from Riot Games about going back to an open qualifier format.
Another problem that might pop up is that two different league systems can cause problems for players, organizations, and fans. With more than 40% of the teams in these leagues being new, it will be hard to predict who gets top 4. If Riot Games doesn’t unify both companies or at least unify the format, it might stagnate the growth of the South East Asian (SEA) scene.
What does this mean for future international tournaments of LOL Esports?
Well, in my opinion, this instability will affect their chances at Worlds and MSI because there is not much time left until these events start. With that said, if they can overcome these issues, they will be able to attend more international LOL Esports tournaments. However, we can’t expect much from them at MSI because their group (group D) is one of the hardest with TSM and Flash Wolves, but they will still show us what they’ve got.
The next international event that SEA might attend is Worlds 2016. Even though there isn’t a lot of time left until then, they have the advantage that this is their primary focus, and if they can improve as a team before MSI, it will help them for Worlds.