Digital Athletics: The Minor Leagues

In League of Legends, professional teams strive to make it to the annual World Championship, where, if they are from North America, they will be erased from existence in a horrible fashion (not literally, hopefully). But ignoring that, these North American teams qualify for Worlds by placing highly in a league known as the LCS. To qualify for the LCS, teams must defeat their opponents in what is known as the Challenger Series. To qualify for this series, the teams need to obtain an extremely high ranking (called Challenger, as it turns out) in the in-game matchmaking system.

While the title of this post says "Minor Leagues", it is not referring to the Challenger Series (and surprisingly, not the NA region itself). The world of eSports is more than just a collection of big organizations, big streams, and big names. Far below it are the tiny tournaments where dreams go to die. And since this is my post, it will be a post about my dead dreams.

Every year, there's a tournament known as the North American Collegiate Championship. The gist of it is that a large amount of universities form teams, which then duke it out against each other until one takes the title. In 2013, I was on one of these teams. Invited by a classmate of mine, Stevens was represented that year by the "Dangerous Ducks" (don't laugh, it was my idea, and nobody had a better one). And we were eradicated round one. My positional opponent had attained the rank of Challenger on the solo ladder, and the rest of his team was also rather good at the video game. There was no chance.

But it didn't stop me from being sad. In future games I became frustrated at my team's performance, and they told me to stop taking things seriously, as the games were only being played for fun. Was I a toxic influence? I thought about this for a while and decided to apologize to my team when we played our next game. This never happened, as I was never invited to one again. The team moved on without me. Dang, all that personal development for nothing.

In 2015, I once again picked up the Stevens standard.

This afternoon, I once again died a little on the inside. The killers this year were all in the solo Challenger rank or the one directly below it, and their combined ranked team was Challenger as well. When the match was played with them, the final score of kills for one game was 40 to 1. My team was not the one with 40.

This is the dark side of eSports. History is written by the victor, and if you don't win, you won't be remembered. Seems like an obvious enough observation. But it stings to be on the receiving end of it. You're just a losing entry on a bracket, and there sure as hell aren't any fans, sponsorships, or stream dollars to fall back on like with the big teams. It's game over. Literally.