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

the big dota tournament this weekend had two hilarious sponsors - tostinos pizza rolls and soylent

hilarious AND apt

*makes "one the nose" gesture*

That reminds me did I tell everybody that this exists?

https://twitter.com/CokeEsports

"hey teen do you like eating but find it too difficult?"

too time consuming, my APM suffers

i'll be honest all the totinos pizza rolls ads on twitch right now have made me want to eat pizza rolls for the first time since college. but i have resisted so far

the ads are not good ads though, they just serve as constant reminders that pizza rolls are a food that exists

i was disappointed that i didn't see any players drinking those soylent 2.0 drinks on stage

I have to admit my interest in the group stage has waned considerably for this second round, the "one group per day" agenda is frankly lame as all hell. If you don't catch the first two or three matches in the AM then who gives a shit? I went from watching almost every match on the rebroadcasts last week to watching basically nothing this week.

If C9 go home tomorrow I'll be SO PISSED.

Also some of the novelty of patch 5.18 pick/bans wore off - darius, boring, morde bans everywhere, a couple teams picked up veigar this week, that's like the big news.

yeah, i didn't watch much of it either, one group a day is a terrible idea. i was interested to see dyrus' last game, though, i learned to play from watching him

rip north america

I like Origen but I wish they hadn't been put up against Flash Wolves to advance. No more Steak! There is always a reason to be sad.

KT not banning smeb's Fiora at all during this round seems profoundly stupid. On one hand, I don't mean to turn this into a subreddit. Still though this seems like a "pound the ball! top lane carry is for pussies!" type of approach to the game; as above, it's fun to watch the strategies evolve, but that also entails watching coaches show how ignorant they are. And I don't even play.

http://www.sbnation.com/2015/10/18/9563119/league-of-legends-2015-world-championships-results-scores-kt-rolster-koo

Lots of roster shakeups in the offseason. Also this:

...Instead of single-game matchups between opponents, weekly matches will take place over a best-of-3 series. The European LCS will be switching to a best-of-2 format...

The NA LCS and EU LCS will have different formats due to cultural reasons, Riot explained in the release. Best-of-2 series in European soccer tournaments are not uncommon, while American sports are quite averse to ties.

That's not going into effect until the summer season though, spring will still be single games

also my team got bought out so I have to pick a new one to support now

were you team 8 for life?

gravity

this is kind of reductive but LCS tends to just turn into a bunch of teams running rock into rock week after week and i'd rather root for the team that's trying to find paper even if they're not always successful

it does look like the raw talent is going to be better distributed in NA this year though so hopefully teams will have to step up their strategy

i think c9 has the most notable history of deviating from the strategic norm and finding success, in their original incarnation, anyway

It's interesting to watch the stables try to settle.

The Doublelift to TSM drama didn't get near enough coverage, or I guess I just don't spend enough time on Reddit? Star QB switches to a rival team, shortly after pantsing said team in the playoffs, and not because they offered more money - but because his original team cut him! This is scripted TV level craziness.

I was sad to hear LemonNation retired from C9. He always seemed to me like the most relatable guy in LCS to me. Is he coaching now? For C9 or who?

yeah he's C9 coach now

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).