Tag: esports

Korea Stories: League of Legends

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of in to League of Legends.

And as much as I’m typically opposed to doing stuff like playing the same game I could play back at home, there was a part of me that was really curious to find out what League would be like in Korea, the region of the world in which the talent is undisputedly the greatest and where the competitive scene is respected and regarded as a legitimate, money-making spectator sport.

I wanted to try playing League of Legends on the Korean server and see what the differences were.  And surely, in the part of the world where League is so highly regarded, I should be able to find some cool League merch, or some professional League gaming team swag, right?

It started out pretty amusingly, when I got to Korea.  Through international roaming, my phone piggybacked onto whatever provider would allow it, and in the case of being in Korea, my phone immediately latched onto an SK Telecom signal.  Now this might seem like no big deal to the vast majority of people, since SK is one of South Korea’s corporate giants that have their fingers in just about every possible business venture from petroleum to telecommunications, but to a League fan, SK is primarily known as the company that owns SKT T1, basically the Chicago Bulls or New York Yankees of the League competitive scene.  SKT has won two of the five world championships (and Korea didn’t play at all in year 1) and are in position to compete for a third, but they are undoubtedly the most prominent team in the entire world, when it comes to League.

Yeah, just connecting to SK Telecom cellular service elicits that much of a response.

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Competitive League still has a lot to learn

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Mythical gf favors European League of Legends team Fnatic.  By proxy, I’ve become somewhat attuned to their standings, and it doesn’t hurt their favor with me when they field Korean players.  Anyway, for the growing demographic of people who follow the competitive League scene, this is the time of the year in which the respective regions begin wrapping things up, and preparing for Worlds.

Regions in North America, Taiwan and to some degree China, have no parity whatsoever, so it’s basically the teams that were expected to make Worlds, pretty much locking things up, and jockeying for seeding, while everyone else is just playing for, well, paychecks.  Korea to no surprise, is a nuclear warzone in itself, as there are no real surprises with the teams that will be making Worlds, but like the others, are duking it out for seeding, with the reigning champs, the two-time winning SK Telecom already getting upset and failing to secure the Korean #1 seed (but still going to Worlds).

If there’s any region that has any parity, and no real predictability, it would have to be Europe.  Up until this year, it was pretty much a surefire bet that Fnatic would make Worlds, as they’ve made it to Worlds almost every single year of competitive play.  However,  due to the never-finalized, perpetually work-in-progress, always young-and-changing rules and format of the competitive scene, this is a year in which Fnatic is by no means a lock to even make it into Worlds.

In fact, if not for a questionable policy in the format, Fnatic should mathematically be eliminated from Worlds qualification.  But because Rito prints so much money, they don’t seem to care that they could milk more games, which would mean more broadcasts, more ads to spam, and more money to make, but as stated, they make so much money that they would rather have a kind of lame policy, instead of creating some sport drama narrative that other, physical sport leagues would salivate at the idea of.

This is the kind of stuff that will always separate eSports from athletic sports.

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Probably not a very smart decision

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Impetus: three popular League of Legends commentators declare refusal to work the Mid-Season Invitational event, citing poor freelance rates.

These guys realize they get paid to talk about video games, right?

Honestly though, I see both sides of the argument here.  Ultimately, I understand the concept of a labor dispute, and it’s good on the part of Monte, DoA and PapaSmithy, that they’ve done their homework, and learned what other casters are making, and it’s only fair that the penultimate game representatives of the eSports scene, should probably be paying competitive rates.

But at the same time, these are guys that make a living talking about video games.  These are not underpaid doctors, teachers, construction workers, civil servants or any other occupation that actually makes a difference in the world we all live in.  These are guys that watch teenagers play video games at a highly-competitive level, and talk about it.

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Photos: Europe Trip – Berlin, Germany WORLDS

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For quite a long time, whenever anyone would inquire about where in the world I would like to go, if I could go anywhere at the drop of a hat, I always responded that Germany was where I would want to go. I didn’t really have much basis behind it, other than the fact that I suppose I wasn’t aching to go visit the Motherland or be all weeabooey and say I wanted to go to Japan; ultimately, I think I always wanted to go somewhere where I could look and feel like a complete foreign tourist, and in my mind, Germany seemed to fit that bill.

Well, thanks to WORLDS, I had my excuse to visit Deutschland, and fulfill that line of thinking. Ultimately, I think I was certainly right, because I was very much the foreign tourist in Berlin, not speaking a lick of German, and aside from the litany of fellow Korean tourists also visiting for WORLDS, being very much in the minority of mostly white people faces.

But the thing is, now in hindsight, I don’t necessarily think that it was everything I had thought it would be.

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Photos: Europe Trip – Brussels, Belgium WORLDS

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The first leg of the Europe trip was Brussels, Belgium, where the semifinals of WORLDS was going to take place. It was pretty much a hit the ground running kind of trip, since as soon as we settled into our hotel in Brussels, we power napped for a while due to the jet lag I’d never experienced in my life before; by the time we woke up, it was pretty much time to go to the venue.

There’s nothing I haven’t already said about the WORLDS experience that wasn’t in my prior post about the event as a whole, but at least now I’m putting up some of the pictures from the event, which include my hot mythical girlfriend, as well as some shots from within the arena itself, attempting to show some of the atmosphere, the championship Summoner’s Cup, as well as some post-victory pictures from SK Telecom’s victory over Origen.

The rest of the pictures are more or less a litany of mushy couple selfies, as well as some of the places we hit up in our free time in actual Brussels, and not the shitty area surrounding the Brussels Expo area.

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Musing about WORLDS

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m never going to deny the fact that ultimately, the impetus for going out to Europe in the first place came about on account of video games, namely the one that I talk about just about every single day, League of Legends. Given the fact that Riot Games made it clear that the annual World Championships would take place in different countries each year, it was a pretty safe bet back in like March that 2015’s WORLDS was very likely going to take place in Europe, considering the previous two WORLDS were in two of the other primary LoL markets of the United States and South Korea. And when it was confirmed that WORLDS would be scattered throughout Europe, it was full speed ahead on making plans not just for attending WORLDS events, but also providing the opportunity to do some European travels.

But yes, for lack of a better term, it all started with WORLDS, and frankly it ended with WORLDS too, since the entire trip was bookended by the WORLDS semifinals in Brussels, with the finals in Berlin.

Everything in between was the sweet gravy of personal travel and new experiences, with the mythical girlfriend.

Anyway, in an attempt to compartmentalize and try to organize my thoughts into neatly organized brog posts, I’m taking an approach of writing about one thing at a time, if I can manage to stick with it; seeing as how WORLDS was what led us to Europe in the first place, I figure there would be no better place to start talking about my Europe trip than talking about WORLDS.

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Photos: League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

So after a few years of watching LoL streams, the east coast of the United States was finally thrown a bone with an actual League event, with the arrival of the first annual Mid-Season Invitational.  The good news was that it was within reasonable driving distance for me, however the bad news was that it was held in Tallahassee, Florida, and most notably, on Florida State campus.

Florida State blows, but since it would be nice to actually attend and see a notable League event, sacrifices had to be made.

Anyway, as a whole, I thought the event was pretty good.  MSI proved that there are in fact, serious LoL fans on the east coast, and hopefully this will be a promising sign that perhaps more things might come to the east coast; maybe not such a shithole like Tallahassee, and perhaps a place that’s easily accessible by anyone via plane, car or internationally, has facilities to host, as well as an existing culture, like say one of the Collegiate teams, like in, oh, I don’t know, like Atlanta*cough?

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