Do like me and get into eSports because that's how American gridiron football dies

i'm interested to see how C9's season goes with Rush as their jungler, he's probably the most exciting player to watch in NA at the moment

Did TSM just decide to go the full Steinbrenner for this season?

TSM has always been pretty analogous to the yankees

i know something exciting happened in LOL this week regarding some guy teleporting back to his base and getting killed? like twice in a row? but i couldn't understand exactly the import of what is was. can someone plz explain?

the "Mark" summoner spell lets you teleport to the location of a target after first hitting them with a snowball. Froggen was in a 1v1 with Doublelift at the All-Star invitational whatever and two matches in a row he hits DL with the snowball and then teleports to DL's location while DL is running back to his home tower. I think early in the game the base turrets can just about one-shot you, so that happened.

yeah tldr it was just a funny and improbable game mechanics interaction that happened causing someone to get insta-killed, then they decided to just restart the game since it was a showmatch, and it happened again

http://www.sbnation.com/2015/12/14/10105038/doublelift-froggen-all-stars-snowball-1-v-1

Wait why is ZionSpartan singing Bieber songs on youtube now

This is a very confusing sport to follow

http://www.sbnation.com/2015/12/18/10612480/nca-lcs-spring-split-2016-schedule-start-date

http://lol.esportspedia.com/wiki/Echo_Fox

i played a little heroes of the storm this weekend and it was fun. i've played lol in the past (and even a little starcraft 2). are other ilxors playing any of these? i'd love to get into some prebuild teams for heroes or lol bc random groups are hit and miss.

ok i'm bored so here's my current takes on this dumb video game sport

NRG and Immortals are the new teams that have actual good rosters, though it's always a toss-up as to whether that manifests into team-level success. i'd expect them to both be middle of the pack in their first split.

CLG is likely to be better than people expect without doublelift, ADC is the most replaceable role in the game since it's mostly micro, and aphromoo was always quietly the most important player on the team. still a downgraded roster though, probably won't be taking 1st place again.

TSM should be able to take their boring conservative playstyle and top tier individual players to a top 3 finish as always, whereas Team Liquid, the other boring conservative playstyle team, is probably headed to the bottom of the standings unless they find a new style

Renegades are kind of a wild card, they've got some big names in their coaching/management staff but not as much on the roster where they're relying on some new-to-LCS players. assuming they field Remilia at support she'll be the first woman in LCS, so that's cool

Dignitas's new roster got kinda laughed out of the room when they revealed it but i think they're actually the most compelling dark horse team, good mix of experience and upside

Cloud 9 has continued to show little to no success with one of the strongest-on-paper rosters, its pretty clear at this point that their dominant 2013-2014 run was lightning in a bottle. still, they added Rush who's arguably the best individual player in the league, and they're always a potential 1st place team if they can get their shit together

Echo Fox is a new team without a revealed roster yet, and Impulse attempted to sell their team with no news on that front yet, I think it's likely that these are going to be last-minute cobbled together rosters with maybe 1 or 2 good players each since that's all that's available at this point. Likely bottom of the barrel teams here, though Keane could make one of them interesting at least if he's on one of them, he was my favorite player to watch last year.

which game(s) are those teams for

LoL - as is the schedule I posted above

I look forward to posting my guided-by-nothing pick-em's to this thread during the spring split

man i wish dota had a regular schedule like LoL, instead all our tournaments end up being in he middle of the work-day or the night

btw i made an esports thing: http://vods.xyz which helps me keep up with all the matches i missed. i'm toying with adding LoL vods but i don't really know the community at all

What are good sites to follow esports news? http://www.sbnation.com/esports kinda sucks and never updates, and I'm too old to keep up with Reddit.

http://www.gosugamers.net maybe? also if team liquid has a LoL site then that's probably pretty decent

idk if there's any decent one-stop site equivalent to espn for esports yet. seems like a real opportunity tbh.

closest thing i can think of is http://www.dailydot.com/topics/esports/ but it's poorly organized, they don't separate headlines by game which gets confusing especially when the same organizations have teams for multiple games. also their LoL guy kinda sucks, idk about the people covering other games since i don't follow them

ive seen a lot of promotion for http://www.thescoreesports.com/ looks pretty decent

oh yeah that site is decent i forgot about it

Thescoreesports is pretty great - the preview for the upcoming EU LCS is good http://www.thescoreesports.com/lol/news/5607 (writeup for NA is coming up soon if not already?)
Liquidlegends.net is not as well maintained as their Starcraft site but the forum is alright.
I think the weekly Youtube show Summoning Insight is great. Episodes are long but you can listen while doing other stuff. It's made by longtime esports journalist Thorin and the American caster Montecristo (he casts the Korean League). They cover EU, NA, Korea, and China and usually have a player or coach as their weekly guest (comes with timestamps so you can skip past regions you don't follow). It's been the most popular (and best imo) League show for a couple of years now.
I also think it's pretty likely that we see more American sites pop up this year since there has been a huge influx of cash in the North American seen in the offseason..

*North American scene obv

despite being one of the few in-depth "long form" esports journalists, i'd steer clear of thoorin since he's an insufferable shitlord

NA LCS starts this weekend, i'm more excited for it than i thought i'd be after not watching most of summer split last year. winter's a better time of year for this stuff.

i think i am defaulting back to being a CLG fan this year unless one of the new teams plays an unorthodox style successfully since that's the shit i like to see most

Yeah, Thorin really likes pissing people off.. I still think SI is the best League show by far though.
NA LCS is very exciting this year imo. A lot of money and a lot of strong rosters with the Korean imports. Will be exciting to see how well CLG does after losing their star player without any clear form of compensation.
The biggest thing for me with both EU and NA this year is that we now get best of three for NA and BO2 for EU which will hopefully make for some great series + better international performance (especially for NA).

the best-of matches don't start until the summer split fyi, this split is still single games

the only thing thoorin does well is one-on-one interviews

he needs an editor tho

speak of the devil http://espn.go.com/esports/

hah u beat me

ps hello fellow doto player

I look forward to posting my guided-by-nothing pick-em's to this thread during the spring split

NA LCS Week 1 Day 1
TSM vs. CLG
-maybe this is wishful thinking but i'm expecting TSM to start slow since they have a dramatically changed roster (no 2 people have played on the same team before) and a new coach. whereas CLG won a lot of their games last year through clever teamplay rather than pure skill and they still have the same guys calling the shots this year so they're very capable of running through slightly better teams
C9 vs. IMT
-this is a good first test for Immortals's coaching staff, i think if they ban out Rush's best champions then they're the better team here, and if they don't do that then they deserve the loss if/when he goes off
DIG vs. NRG
-i do like Dignitas as a sleeper pick but they're way outclassed in both solo lanes in this matchup which is a recipe for disaster
REN vs. TL
-i never watched Renegades play in the minors last year but people are reasonably high on them, and Liquid is a chronically underperforming team that lost their best player. this is still pretty much 50/50 to me though so the edge goes to the more experienced team
FOX vs. TIP
-Impulse is headed straight to relegation if they don't pull some serious magic out of nowhere, everyone on their roster is likely 9th or 10th best out of the 10 teams at their position

TSM
C9
NRG
REN
FOX

Watching the new ADC + Support lanes is going to be entertaining, I think. I see your point re: TSM but I think they're going to just steamroll folks until people figure out their number, and at some point they'll implode, but that might not even happen until after this split

Sunday:

REN
CLG
TSM
C9
IMT

NA LCS Week 1 Day 2
REN vs. NRG
DIG vs. CLG
TSM vs. TL
FOX vs. C9
IMT vs. TIP
mostly good team vs bad team on Sunday, REN/NRG is the only one that's close on paper

TSM usually doesn't implode until worlds, NA finals last year being an exception. i think there's a good chance they'll dominate NA LCS into the foreseeable future with yellowstar shot calling, but that depends on their roster having good chemistry. svenskeren is a big question mark for me.

first day of NA LCS coverage starting now if any of the uninitiated want to see what this crap is all about http://www.twitch.tv/riotgames

Did not see that CLG win coming.
Or that REN-TL would take a full hour! holy smokes

ok what I said about TSM I meant Immortals

immortals vs tsm is next saturday, that'll be the big test

that 2v4 w/ pobelter + huni was brilliant. perfect game in 18 minutes O_O

sorry i just realized we might be doing no-spoilers here?

imo spoilers are fine, treat this like any other sports thread, it's interesting how that's even a concept for esports though as very few people watch stuff like football etc after-the-fact

pretty much every other pro sport intentionally makes it a pain in the ass to watch anything but highlights after the game

And yes, treat as any other sports thread, if you haven't seen the matches you're interested in, avoid

Saturday 1/23:

TIP C9
TSM IMT
TL CLG
DIG REN
NRG FOX

Sunday 1/24:

TSM DIG
NRG IMT
CLG C9
FOX TL
REN TIP

looks about right to me, idk what to make of TL's new roster yet though

like were they actually playing well last week or is TSM just shit rn

so is IMT the favorites at this pt? they just look so good but i haven't watched many of the other matches so far so i don't know how they compare to the rest of the field

They're definitely the favorites now, their roster is almost as good as TSM's and they look way crisper as a team already. Also have shown an ability to close out winning games quickly which has been an issue for NA teams other than CLG for a long time

Week 2
Day 1: C9, IMT, CLG, DIG, NRG
Day 2: DIG, IMT, CLG, TL, REN