It’s easy to think that the League of Legends Esports scene is just teams like Moscow 5 and mTw duking it out on top of a podium while their adoring fans cheer and gasp, like Olympian gladiators locked in deadly combat. But, more and more, Esports organisers like ESL are putting on bigger and bigger tournaments, not in terms of publicity, but in terms of numbers. There’s even a weekly Go4LoL tournament every Sunday that has up to 7,500 players competing globally.
Which makes the creaky way of pulling competitors into a custom, passworded game, playing the match, tallying up everything after the fact and then putting it up on the appropriate websites a little clunky. Especially with so many matches being played, and so much data flying back and forth. Riot are addressing this by introducing the ‘Tournament Code’, a system made in partnership with ESL that lets you plug the tournament right into the game.
The idea is that if you’re competing in a match, or one of the commentators, you’ll be given a code to then place inside the League of Legends client. That’ll take you right to the match with the minimum of fuss, but much more importantly it will automatically upload the details of that match the instant it’s finished to the appropriate database. It’s currently only ESL who are using it, which is fair as they helped develop the thing, but the forum post on the official forums says we shouldn’t be surprised to see it pop up in other tournaments in the future.
Which is all especially interesting when you consider League of Legends: Supremacy, the tradmark Riot took out last week. As we speculated in our post on it, there are plenty of Esports implications within the trademark description. This could well be the first salvo of a bunch of changes to the way League of Legends handles its burgeoning Esports community. Or it could just be a red herring. We’ll never know.
Actually, we’ll know when they announce Supremacy, which, with both Gamescom and PAX coming up, could be soon. They’re the sort of big conventions you’d want to announce something at, I’d imagine.