League of Legends: how Riot killed the Challenger Series
The First Stab
Unfortunately, nothing good can last. A year later, in 2017 Summer, Riot announced (may have announced: I never saw it) that coverage for the League of Legends Challenger Series would only feature certain “highlight” games each week. The rest of the games would be played without coverage.
And so the next blow was dealt.
Removing the bulk of coverage from the Challenger Series was not initially a terrible thing. The League had no awe-inspiring teams this split, anyway, and most people watching were doing so for the Delta Fox Meme Stream Dream Team.
Further, Riot seemed to have had done their due diligence, and began coverage with highlights, results and commentary for the missing games of each week, allowing viewers to catch up on the story in the same way exposition or backstories allow us to understand the implications or events in a novel or TV show.
They had followed this system in the previous years, highlighting the missed coverage from the first half of play. Why would this be any different?
The answer, as always, comes down to narrative.
The same year C9 Challenger were surging through the Lesser League, DC released their anti-hero movie Suicide Squad. This movie under performed in theaters for several reasons. For one, the story was a shambling, tangled mess with more holes than Swiss cheese at a shootout.
More importantly, though, the characters sucked, an issue that lingered from the very beginning of the movie. In the first 45 minutes, the director attempted to cram all of his characters’ backstories together, one after the other. The result was a bizarre, disjointed viewing experience, feeling like a collection of character summaries rather than an actual narrative.
When people came to the theater to see this movie, the experience was cheapened because we had trouble telling why the story mattered and why we should care about the characters involved. Their origins were canned, cliché and rushed.
Rather than generating our own feelings, we were “told” the nature of our central characters in 15-minute backstories rather than “shown” properly. Marvel, on the other hand, gave each Avenger a central role in his or her own movie, allowing the viewers to properly understand their narrative and lore in the process.
The same rules that sank Suicide Squad formed this stab inflicted to the Challenger Series. Rather than seeing the mini-narratives of each week of games, we were told what had happened in the previous games of the week, with a few handy clips for illustration, before watching the one (or two) series’ for the week.
In other words, the experience had begun to cheapen, the narrative became more canned, given to us, rather than allowing us to form our own impressions with the aid of clear and compelling commentary. In a few years, we had gone from a full day of Challenger coverage to one or two series’ over the course of the week’s games.
However, this was a comparatively small betrayal for the shenanigans Riot had in store.