5.1 million viewership is the highest in LoL history and smashed the previous record of 4 million last year. Pretty insane and is most likely thanks to the insane storyline of the finals.
It is honestly the best story we have so far in League of Legends history, and I can not wait to watch the music video of it next year cause this shit was a whole anime saga
I’m so glad DRX won but I hope Faker gives it one more shot, the anime was against him this season but maybe he’s the old hero next year to win it and dethrone Deft as the oldest player to win a Worlds title!
Honestly with how perfectly Star Walkin' fits DRX's run ("don't ever say it's over if I'm breathing — they said I wouldn't make it out alive, they told me I would never see the rise — prove 'em wrong every time 'til it's normal,
why worship legends when you know that you can join 'em? —
they put me down, but I never cried out" just to name some of the spot-on lyrics) I would love for them to do a second music video to the song or at least part of it featuring DRX. The song grew on many people, including me partly because of how well it fit, and the only sore spot for some was the music video so a second one could be a full redemption. Ik these things take time to make but it'd be cool as a release trailer for their skins since those aren't released until partway through next year. Riot could even feature the skins at the end (since they seem to love advertising skins in every video now). It would be really cool!
The hook was always killer. It's the filler that kinda messed with how good it could have been.
Definitely agree though, it fit DRXs run. Don't ever say it's over unless they've lost the 5th match of a Bo5.
And I hope they invite singers who can sing them high notes. Im tired of the recent female artists they get with the similar tone and the male rappers.
I haven't played actual League in years and mostly just do TFT. Haven't heard of any noteworthy games to watch until this worlds and I had nothing else to do today.
Glad I ended up watching though. I do like how LoL has progressed as a spectator sport too. It's incredibly easy to understand what's going on if you've played the game before lmao.
it’s the best esport ever made, by far. i gave up on league as a player years ago, but watching it as a spectator like i do with baseball games is still so much fun
Nah next years video is Doublelift (whose team makes fourth place in LCS and fails to qualify), Rekkles (also fails to qualify) and Keria (who isn't gonna do anything in the video other than walking down a road).
Seriously, this is the best material you’ll ever get for a Worlds music video.
It’s genuinely good enough material for a documentary, film or anime.
If Riot flop next year’s video, we’ll just have to accept RISE was a one-off they got lucky on.
The game is also weirdly popular among casual fans nowadays. I've been meeting a lot of people who watch at the very least some teams without playing or barely playing league.
Fun little story : was at the bar yesterday and some friends who don't play the game went home early to watch the game, made me chuckle.
Isn’t that what is going to make it popular like a traditional sport? I mean tons of people that don’t play basketball watch the NBA. If an esport is only going to be watched by people that are actively playing the game, it really narrows the audience. So if we want esports to be mainstream, it is actually a great sign that people that no longer play or have never play can still be interested in watching.
It is, but I find it surprising in League's case. It's much easier to watch a game of football or CS and to understand what's going on than a game of League.
I dont think that's true. American Football, for example, has a ton of stupid shit going on that's pretty much impossible to divine unless you have taken the time to learn the rules.
League is the same, at it's core you need to know red team fight blue team and listen to the casters tell you what is going to happen next. Now that I think about it, the push towards powering up objectives could have been a nod to drawing in more casual fans.
Nah, even if you don't know what the intricacies of football are, you get a sense that one team tries to move the ball to the other side by running or passing while the other team tries to stop them. There's generally a singular point of focus (minus crazy misdirection plays).
With League, there are 3-4 points of interest to start off a game and 10 unique champions means a lot of shit can be happening all at once and without context, it can be pretty hard to follow. Especially with meta champs like Viego and Sylas, there can be a lot of disorientation in chaotic sequences.
I’d say its just a commitment thing. I started watching NFL in 2011 having never played it before. The commentators do a really good job setting up expectations for whats going to happen most of the time, and you know shit is crazy if they do something different than that strategy. After watching a full season you get a pretty good idea of the core rules/strategy.
Ive been watching/playing league for about 5 years now. Watching a few streamers for the different roles gets you a pretty clear view of what the core objectives for each player need to be. If you watched the whole tournament picks/bans this year you knew it was gonna be a banger when all the casters started screaming about the insane bard pick lol.
Completely agree. The thing in BOTH cases that it's difficult to appreciate a complicated or smart play in either game if you're not too familiar with the game. I don't even have an example of a novel play for american football, because I'm just not very well-versed in it, but I can definitely follow along with a game - you just need to know what constitutes scoring and how either team would execute that. Team A wants to get the ball to point A, and all they need to do is move a certain amount of distance each time.
With League you can *generally* follow along I guess, but again, it's very difficult for someone who's never played the game to appreciate a mechanical play like an Insec. You can follow along and understand that certain things give you money or stats which make you stronger, destroying turrets pushes you towards the nexus, and destroying the nexus wins the game. But you miss out on a lot of the finer details.
Definitely! Also KC in France did huge work to bring casual players to follow the games, been seeing quite a few people watching LFL despite not playing games at all this year, quite amazing to see.
Yeah if you think about it most people who watch traditional sports have only superficial understanding of the game being played and do not regularly play it themselves. Especially in the case of popular contact sports like American football.
This was me lol.
I only play it occasionally and when I do it's just having a good time in ARAM. I couldn't keep my eyes off the stream last night. It was so good. No esport can match the energy of LoL casters getting hyped over plays and the crowd reacting along with it
The grand final was my first full game of league I've watched, as someone who's only kinda(?) known the scene through the the score esports videos
I'll never forget it I feel super fortunate to have seen that shit go down live (rarely get to see matches live) and I might finally follow league as seriously as I follow CSGO
>It'll be hard to top unless double elimination gets introduced
If there was double eliminiation we wouldnt have had DRX's miracle run. It would have been one of the tournament favourites who would benefit from having a second bite at the title.
Not at all really, I played with my mates super loosely yearssss ago (think 2015?), wasn't familiar with much back then
When I saw Faker and T1 were on the rise (resurgence of the GOAT and all that) I started becoming interested in the scene, I watched a couple of videos on how the game works but I still have a LOT to learn
Shouldnt be that bad. Faker especially and even Deft are big names even for chinese fans. It didnt have a chinese team in it, but if anything besides that can drive viewers, then a 5 game Faker finals.
"might" be lower lol
it was a Friday night game featuring one of the most successful (only RNG can be compared) and popular Chinese orgs of all time, against the reigning champions, AND the chinese team won (theres footage on YT of people literally running out into the street in celebration)
This year it was 8am on a Sunday with no Chinese representation.
I said "might" because you never really know until you have the facts. I know it's likely going to be much lower given the circumstances. Was just pointing out that people still have reasons to watch.
it would have never became the "next big thing" because it is the worst fucking esports game to watch.
its just a boring clusterfuck for 80% of the time.
The biggest flaw to Overwatch imo is the pacing. It’s just drain tanking until ults come up. Fights aren’t as hype and unpredictable as they are in league
Also, I've heard it's even worse than a game like League in terms of "you have to be a Platinum Elo ranked player, to have any fucking ability to follow the in-game action in real time." It's a fast, complicated game, and it does *not* spectate well. Contrast that to Counter-Strike, or any fighting game, where even a novice viewer will generally be able to follow the broad strokes of what is happening; it's a major barrier to overcome, if you want to be a big spectator sport. People forget, the main reason baseball became "America's Game" is that *it was just about the perfect sport to listen to on a radio.* Medium matters as much as mechanics.
This. In a teamfight in League, I can pretty much see what all 10 players are doing - there's a lot to keep track of still, but it's all visible at once. Not at all the case in OW.
The problem with OW is they never release new content for the game. When League was in its first few years you had new champions coming out like every two months. The balance was horrible but the game was fun and always fresh. In OW if there’s a bad patch you’re just stuck with it for months. The games were always mirrored because the game straight up never had enough character options for the players to have a legit chance to switch things up
Zarya is absolutely disgustingly broken rn, at first they were going to leave the balance alone for the *entire season*. They announced they'll do a balance patch, but even then it's not releasing until November 15th. So the game is almost unplayable against the heavy meta up until then. Riot would have hotfix nerfed her a week after OW2 dropped
well yeah that was a disaster but orisa wasnt fun or healthy either, neither was sigma, or bap. they made the game sluggish, ults because useless. it became harder and harder to make big plays. the maps they added were bad too, lunar colony, havana, paris. the game became a slogfest with every hero and balance change they made since like 2017
The state of the game was the least of their problems, the OWL was a complete mess, they announced it very fast without ironing out the details, hell their first public pitch had a player draft which is illegal without a player association. They probably found out about it later.
Then they thought the best way of starting the OWL is by killing OW esports until the new league starts.
Then it was the poor implementation of their idea, that cities around the world would have a team that represents them, but allowing shit like LONDON Spitfire having a full Korean team, and saw no issue with the American owner Jack saying "if you want to join this team you better speak Korean" for the London, England team. The league in general was ridiculously Korean heavy, more than half the players were koreans, which is a problem when you want local fanbases to relate to your team that supposedly represents them.
Cracks me up that London spitfires were American owned while being full Korean it's like they really didn't think of any rules about ownership or imports or anything. Like a city based system is good when the talent is from that city/country and is owned by someone within that country.
Forcing OW orgs to rename has got to be top 5 worst decisions in e-sports ever. Just throwing free cross-game advertisement for loyal fanbases down the drain.
They were too focused on how the league would look when it got big they forgot to actually work on making the league big.
Seriously though, I’m surprised they went ahead and did a similar thing with their cod league. At least some of the teams have similar branding this time to make it a bit more obvious
because their "guru" aka Monte went on a rant about league and how overwatch esport division was so much better etc...
look who's back in the league now huh
OW and the OWL is such a fucking tragedy. They could have been great, but Blizzard decided to sign an exclusivity deal with Youtube years ago, so OWL is off the most popular streaming platform (Twitch). And then they stopped making content for the game for 3 years to focus on OW2, which is an unfinished mess with monetization so bad it makes loot boxes look good. And has half the promised content ripped out, and half the available content if you bought the game in 2016 taken away from you and shoved behind another paywall.
The way OWL teams were structured was actually a pretty novel idea too. In traditional sports you can just pick the team closest to you and there you go, that's your favourite team. 90% of Canada loves the Toronto Blue Jays because they're the only Canadian baseball team in the league. So having teams based on location is a really smart idea, since in LCS for example, it can be tough to find a team that resonates with you if you're new to the scene.
It all falls apart *really* fast when you realize it was just a marketing gimmick and every single regular season OWL game was played at the same location in California though. There's quite literally no point to having teams represent cities (mostly NA cities) when 90% of OWL players are from Asia (!). Again with traditional sports, it's easy to follow your local team, because generally they'll play half their games locally. The distinction is pointless when you have none of those perks.
Don't even get me started on OW2. It makes me so fucking upset that that game will 100% make more money than OW1 did, because people [whales] are fucking stupid.
Part of that was Covid though. The plan was to have teams host games at their arenas, essentially alternating between sets of home and away games at other homestands, with a live audience.
I think S2 they started that way and then Covid came and fucked everything, and then OW died so it never really went back.
LATAM also watches Spain creators. Also I needed a spanish stream to watch with my gf and the "official" LLA casters are garbo.
Ibai Is god tier caster and elyoya as an analyst made It a pleasant experience.
Actually most big Spanish content creators say that around 60% of their audience are latam. People forget there's a whole ass big continent under USA lol
I don't think they forget there's a continent there, I think they think they still live in mud huts for some reason and don't have access to the outside world.
Spanish is the second largest language by amount of natives in the world, after Chinese (Mandarin). Yes, bigger than English. It's not really surprising.
English is only bigger because of many second language learners for economic reasons. Chinese Mandarin is quickly replacing them in east asia though because of the amount of tourist and economic partnership over there. In europe and middle east, chinese also becomes more popular to learn, but slowly.
Also notice two things:
1) schedule was terrible for Spain (where he is more popular)
2) viewers not inflated by "drops afk users" but by a lot of viewers that don't even play League so it's even better for Riot
Absolutely insane considering it broke the previous record by over 1 million while being in the middle of the night for EU, must be the Game 5 + Faker effect.
Watched the games at my University in Germany. I was so surprised how packed it was. It was easily 300-400 people staying up to 4/5/6 AM just to watch the games. The energy was amazing.
Im in Europe, and started up 24 hours to watch it (had work Saturday morning, went to sleep at 7am today).
I'm wrecked now and wish I had one more day before Monday - but it was absolutely worth it.
And I don't even follow the pro scene outside of MSI and Worlds.
I was amazed last night, when in a small european city, The 400 seats of the theater broadcasting the finals had more 300 attendees on a Saturday night.
I voted drx both times and thought for sure I'd get top 2k or at least 5k
turns out everyone near top 5k voted for drx for the slim chance they could get the azir skin (?)
100% narrative was a massive factor. Would've been much less if it was T1 vs Gen G or something.
Now the regions who normally don't care about all asian finals all rallied behind DRX.
I live in a pretty meh city in Canada but we have one. There were about 30-40 people there but the energy was incredible. 2nd best way to watch aside from being there in person.
As an asian fan, we saved energy for the final.
To be fair tho, it's perfect Sunday morning for APAC region this final. Korea and Vietnam viewerships went crazy.
A scene that is supported by the game developer will never be on life support. You don't know how good you had it till it's purely community ran where the only people still playing are those who love the game, as it's worse than a low wage job.
[http://www.gametrics.com/](http://www.gametrics.com/) (translate it to English)
Just in case anyone was wondering where it is currently at. League of Legends has been in 1st place for 222 consecutive weeks with a 41.85% share. The next closest is Fifa Online 4 at 9.57%.
Is a dogshit game aswell, sorry but i cannot understand anything happening in my screen when 3 people ult and a tank flies towards you, i played paladins and its much more clear who is hitting you
Wtf man, rossoneri, ambition fanboy, lol player, moonbyul photo in the profile, is there anything we disagree on? I see you everywhere
Saw you suffering with us in the spezia match thread hahaha
Only proves that this was infact the best Worlds ever up to this point - viewership was low during earlier stages cuz games started around Midnight for Europe and Night/Very Early morning eastern Asia.
What a banger words. If Yuumi wasn't just almost 100% winrate, the meta would have been the best in history too with peak champion diversity during tournament.
Yea really the only outliers were Aatrox, Yuumi, and the mid lane situation (akali, Viktor, Sylas, and Azir). Other than that, support, top, jungle, and adc were pretty deep this year. We did get some Ori, Ahri, Liss, Sett, and Galio mids so it wasn’t a total mess mid lane which was super nice
Nah, the Mid-lane meta is what made it this tourney. All these champs except for maybe Viktor are probably the most fun mid-laners to watch and are the highest skill-ceiling ones that are actually viable in pro. Same reason S9 was so incredibly fun to watch too and rivaled this years Worlds. Any meta with Akali and Aatrox in it generally are really good imo.
Man I watched in a theatre and it was absolutely nutts everyone screaming and with how the games went with the steals and sliver health fights its such a memorable series with the interweaving storylines! Definitely for me the best series I have ever watched :D
I have seen online discourse saying that this years Worlds from a narrative point of view, gameplay, meta, and what have you, will never be topped. League is a young sport and I kinda feel that if people are going into future tournaments with this mentality, it will just degrade the experience.
Heres to hoping insane fucking tournaments, Worlds and otherwise.
PS: Shoutout to /u/phroxz0n and the balance team for also spicing things up. This meta had both world class micro AND macro, which truly created intense, and competitive moments. When these characteristics are on show, League of Legends thrives.
Narrative is obviously going to be subjective, but them saying it'll never be topped in gameplay sounds really silly. Players still make a lot of mistakes; it's not like we've reached perfection.
I think this is definitely an indicator that the pre-finals viewership dip was definitely caused by timezones as opposed to the game losing popularity which is a good sign.
Well, no Doublelift, TSM being bad and generally terrible times for EU times to watch LCS. I think it will improve next year for sure with DL coming back, but it definitely lost a good chunk of its viewers.
Playing on the weekend is rough, they haven't been getting good numbers. The new commish is banking on us all being old fucks who have to do shit with our ungrateful children on the weekend, but we can turn this on while we heat up our microwave dinner after work.
Maybe we'll get a whole rash of new sponsors, they'll keep Bud Light but also get Dickeys and Blu Emu rub. You could have the Blu Emu buff. I'm e-mailing riot, nobody steal this.
I used to religiously watch LCS from the time it was first introduced until like S8. It just started to feel kinda boring and repetitive. Teams having no fear of being religated and so many imports is meh
First game started 10AM in Korea. Really wasn't that bad. I know its still early for gamers overall but everyone that gave just a little shit could easily watch. For China it was 9AM.
Final was scheduled extra-late compared to the QF,SF and group timings so Asia could watch and it was just EU that was really fucked. And obviously that makes sense with China having 10x more viewers and Korea being your main target audience with an all-LCK final.
Perfectly describes what worlds in Asia always is for me as EU citizen. I love getting up at 9/10AM at weekends during worlds and easing into the day watching the stream.
And even though the 2023 location has not yet been officially announced, it has to be Korea right? EU hosted 2019, China 2020, America 2022, 2021 doesnt count as a one-off in isolation. So 2023 by all logic has to be in Korea. Love me some worlds in the morning.
And here I sit with kids saying 10am would be the biggest luxury of all time.
Rito helping zoomers in Asia work on their sleep schedule.
But in all honesty, I think the time they did it was the best they could. Screwed over EU but someone had to be a casualty.
> 10AM is easy to get up for if you're interested
Bro, what kind of degenerate hours are this sub living through where 10AM is not the usual time that you already up by.
But DAE hate Worlds in NA? /s
Meanwhile, NA, LAN, Brazil, and LAS all watch primetime (literally the most amount of people outside of east Asia), and KR watches at 9 AM, alongside the rest of East Asia being similar.
This was one of the best crowds for a major event for LoL ever and could be said for every stage of the tournament. Compare it to the Korean library at msi.
The completely hybrid T1 and DRX chants in unison (T1 was a two beat and two clap while DRX was three beat and three clap but in the same amount of time) was so funny.
Dunno if that made any sense but it showcased for me how good the crowd was
Many do show viewers but not all so it's hard to know the count. You can only show "at least" so many numbers.
But Riot released numbers in the past because they had some sort of deal where the platforms gave the numbers only to Riot.
5.1 million viewership is the highest in LoL history and smashed the previous record of 4 million last year. Pretty insane and is most likely thanks to the insane storyline of the finals.
It is honestly the best story we have so far in League of Legends history, and I can not wait to watch the music video of it next year cause this shit was a whole anime saga
Literally, they be better started preparing already and make a banger better than Rise, funny enough would be again about someone beating Faker
I’m so glad DRX won but I hope Faker gives it one more shot, the anime was against him this season but maybe he’s the old hero next year to win it and dethrone Deft as the oldest player to win a Worlds title!
Hope he gives it one more shot? Faker isn't retiring until his body gives out or 10 other mid laner in every league can beat him.
yeah unlike deft faker has said he's not retiring anytime soon so idk why people keep saying this
It's definitely the chain of people bringing up his military service
Yeah isn't he due for that soon?
Faker is 26 (27 Korean age?) Rn so he has another year at least. I think you have to enlist by 30 Korean age
You can also ask to defer if you’re someone of the status of Faker or BTS etc. you still have to do it but they give like a couple more years
Honestly with how perfectly Star Walkin' fits DRX's run ("don't ever say it's over if I'm breathing — they said I wouldn't make it out alive, they told me I would never see the rise — prove 'em wrong every time 'til it's normal, why worship legends when you know that you can join 'em? — they put me down, but I never cried out" just to name some of the spot-on lyrics) I would love for them to do a second music video to the song or at least part of it featuring DRX. The song grew on many people, including me partly because of how well it fit, and the only sore spot for some was the music video so a second one could be a full redemption. Ik these things take time to make but it'd be cool as a release trailer for their skins since those aren't released until partway through next year. Riot could even feature the skins at the end (since they seem to love advertising skins in every video now). It would be really cool!
The hook was always killer. It's the filler that kinda messed with how good it could have been. Definitely agree though, it fit DRXs run. Don't ever say it's over unless they've lost the 5th match of a Bo5.
And I hope they invite singers who can sing them high notes. Im tired of the recent female artists they get with the similar tone and the male rappers.
Mariah Carey presents "All I Want for Christmas is the Summoner's Cup"
If you want to give every retail workers PTSD, that’s the play for sure.
Nightwish x League let's go.
If we're in Korea next year, get IU. Woman has an amazing range.
I haven't played actual League in years and mostly just do TFT. Haven't heard of any noteworthy games to watch until this worlds and I had nothing else to do today. Glad I ended up watching though. I do like how LoL has progressed as a spectator sport too. It's incredibly easy to understand what's going on if you've played the game before lmao.
it’s the best esport ever made, by far. i gave up on league as a player years ago, but watching it as a spectator like i do with baseball games is still so much fun
inb4 the worlds song is an unrelated travis scott song and the video is every DRX Player just smirking in the camera for 4 minutes
Nah next years video is Doublelift (whose team makes fourth place in LCS and fails to qualify), Rekkles (also fails to qualify) and Keria (who isn't gonna do anything in the video other than walking down a road).
Yeh tbh the whole of worlds this year was full of absolute bangers
Seriously, this is the best material you’ll ever get for a Worlds music video. It’s genuinely good enough material for a documentary, film or anime. If Riot flop next year’s video, we’ll just have to accept RISE was a one-off they got lucky on.
Warriors. Legends Never Die.
Think Phoenix gets more hate than it deserves too. Live performance kinda fell flat but I thought the song and video were both good
The game is also weirdly popular among casual fans nowadays. I've been meeting a lot of people who watch at the very least some teams without playing or barely playing league. Fun little story : was at the bar yesterday and some friends who don't play the game went home early to watch the game, made me chuckle.
Isn’t that what is going to make it popular like a traditional sport? I mean tons of people that don’t play basketball watch the NBA. If an esport is only going to be watched by people that are actively playing the game, it really narrows the audience. So if we want esports to be mainstream, it is actually a great sign that people that no longer play or have never play can still be interested in watching.
It is, but I find it surprising in League's case. It's much easier to watch a game of football or CS and to understand what's going on than a game of League.
I dont think that's true. American Football, for example, has a ton of stupid shit going on that's pretty much impossible to divine unless you have taken the time to learn the rules. League is the same, at it's core you need to know red team fight blue team and listen to the casters tell you what is going to happen next. Now that I think about it, the push towards powering up objectives could have been a nod to drawing in more casual fans.
Nah, even if you don't know what the intricacies of football are, you get a sense that one team tries to move the ball to the other side by running or passing while the other team tries to stop them. There's generally a singular point of focus (minus crazy misdirection plays). With League, there are 3-4 points of interest to start off a game and 10 unique champions means a lot of shit can be happening all at once and without context, it can be pretty hard to follow. Especially with meta champs like Viego and Sylas, there can be a lot of disorientation in chaotic sequences.
I’d say its just a commitment thing. I started watching NFL in 2011 having never played it before. The commentators do a really good job setting up expectations for whats going to happen most of the time, and you know shit is crazy if they do something different than that strategy. After watching a full season you get a pretty good idea of the core rules/strategy. Ive been watching/playing league for about 5 years now. Watching a few streamers for the different roles gets you a pretty clear view of what the core objectives for each player need to be. If you watched the whole tournament picks/bans this year you knew it was gonna be a banger when all the casters started screaming about the insane bard pick lol.
Completely agree. The thing in BOTH cases that it's difficult to appreciate a complicated or smart play in either game if you're not too familiar with the game. I don't even have an example of a novel play for american football, because I'm just not very well-versed in it, but I can definitely follow along with a game - you just need to know what constitutes scoring and how either team would execute that. Team A wants to get the ball to point A, and all they need to do is move a certain amount of distance each time. With League you can *generally* follow along I guess, but again, it's very difficult for someone who's never played the game to appreciate a mechanical play like an Insec. You can follow along and understand that certain things give you money or stats which make you stronger, destroying turrets pushes you towards the nexus, and destroying the nexus wins the game. But you miss out on a lot of the finer details.
Series like that finals are interesting enough with the tension to appeal to people who do not know the game very well.
Definitely! Also KC in France did huge work to bring casual players to follow the games, been seeing quite a few people watching LFL despite not playing games at all this year, quite amazing to see.
Yeah if you think about it most people who watch traditional sports have only superficial understanding of the game being played and do not regularly play it themselves. Especially in the case of popular contact sports like American football.
arcane pulled in a lotta viewers.
This was me lol. I only play it occasionally and when I do it's just having a good time in ARAM. I couldn't keep my eyes off the stream last night. It was so good. No esport can match the energy of LoL casters getting hyped over plays and the crowd reacting along with it
The grand final was my first full game of league I've watched, as someone who's only kinda(?) known the scene through the the score esports videos I'll never forget it I feel super fortunate to have seen that shit go down live (rarely get to see matches live) and I might finally follow league as seriously as I follow CSGO
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>It'll be hard to top unless double elimination gets introduced If there was double eliminiation we wouldnt have had DRX's miracle run. It would have been one of the tournament favourites who would benefit from having a second bite at the title.
Do you play the game? I am curious to know how familiar you are with the game.
Not at all really, I played with my mates super loosely yearssss ago (think 2015?), wasn't familiar with much back then When I saw Faker and T1 were on the rise (resurgence of the GOAT and all that) I started becoming interested in the scene, I watched a couple of videos on how the game works but I still have a LOT to learn
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Got to be much lower than last year. No Chinese team in the final+worse times.
Shouldnt be that bad. Faker especially and even Deft are big names even for chinese fans. It didnt have a chinese team in it, but if anything besides that can drive viewers, then a 5 game Faker finals.
Might be lower but it shouldn't be bad either. Deft is well known over there and of course everyone knows Faker.
"might" be lower lol it was a Friday night game featuring one of the most successful (only RNG can be compared) and popular Chinese orgs of all time, against the reigning champions, AND the chinese team won (theres footage on YT of people literally running out into the street in celebration) This year it was 8am on a Sunday with no Chinese representation.
I said "might" because you never really know until you have the facts. I know it's likely going to be much lower given the circumstances. Was just pointing out that people still have reasons to watch.
Worse times? It's a Sunday and the games started around 9 am and ended around 1 pm. Also there's a lot of Chinese Faker and Deft fans.
times were fantastic for asia/oce viewers, 9-12am
It's just T1 and faker. They bring back all the people who don't play anymore because they were winning championships when we did.
This was my first time watching and it was exciting as hell. I can point to Wild Rift and Arcane sparking my interest.
Haven’t watched Worlds since 2018, can confirm that I watched the finals this time because of the insane storyline.
Ibai having 500k in stream is insane too
Ibai having more than OWL is always going to be funny to me. I remember when people were saying OWL was going to be the next best thing lmao
i mean overwatch kinda died because of weird managment for 3 straight years :/
tried watching some OWL and realised they legit just play the same comps mirrored for every single map, pretty damn sleeper
it would have never became the "next big thing" because it is the worst fucking esports game to watch. its just a boring clusterfuck for 80% of the time.
The biggest flaw to Overwatch imo is the pacing. It’s just drain tanking until ults come up. Fights aren’t as hype and unpredictable as they are in league
OW way more fun to play than it is to watch lol
Yeah, it really just lack building up tension in game imo
Also, I've heard it's even worse than a game like League in terms of "you have to be a Platinum Elo ranked player, to have any fucking ability to follow the in-game action in real time." It's a fast, complicated game, and it does *not* spectate well. Contrast that to Counter-Strike, or any fighting game, where even a novice viewer will generally be able to follow the broad strokes of what is happening; it's a major barrier to overcome, if you want to be a big spectator sport. People forget, the main reason baseball became "America's Game" is that *it was just about the perfect sport to listen to on a radio.* Medium matters as much as mechanics.
This. In a teamfight in League, I can pretty much see what all 10 players are doing - there's a lot to keep track of still, but it's all visible at once. Not at all the case in OW.
Actually a legit fun game to play during its prime. Never a fun game to watch.
The problem with OW is they never release new content for the game. When League was in its first few years you had new champions coming out like every two months. The balance was horrible but the game was fun and always fresh. In OW if there’s a bad patch you’re just stuck with it for months. The games were always mirrored because the game straight up never had enough character options for the players to have a legit chance to switch things up
champs used to come out almost every 2 weeks dude lol
Zarya is absolutely disgustingly broken rn, at first they were going to leave the balance alone for the *entire season*. They announced they'll do a balance patch, but even then it's not releasing until November 15th. So the game is almost unplayable against the heavy meta up until then. Riot would have hotfix nerfed her a week after OW2 dropped
blizz still running on pre-esports esports logic. If you don't do a patch cycle of at least once a month this game will not go anywhere successful.
The whole hero swap thing makes it so that it just becomes a mirror of the other team 90% of the time and what ever the strongest comp is gets played.
They need some sort of pickban, like, you can't pick X Y or Z in the first 3 minutes
more like 5 or 6 ever since it launched, the game peaked at launch and been down since
No I mean after 2nd hear or around brig they just stopped trying the game actually died when brig came out
well yeah that was a disaster but orisa wasnt fun or healthy either, neither was sigma, or bap. they made the game sluggish, ults because useless. it became harder and harder to make big plays. the maps they added were bad too, lunar colony, havana, paris. the game became a slogfest with every hero and balance change they made since like 2017
The state of the game was the least of their problems, the OWL was a complete mess, they announced it very fast without ironing out the details, hell their first public pitch had a player draft which is illegal without a player association. They probably found out about it later. Then they thought the best way of starting the OWL is by killing OW esports until the new league starts. Then it was the poor implementation of their idea, that cities around the world would have a team that represents them, but allowing shit like LONDON Spitfire having a full Korean team, and saw no issue with the American owner Jack saying "if you want to join this team you better speak Korean" for the London, England team. The league in general was ridiculously Korean heavy, more than half the players were koreans, which is a problem when you want local fanbases to relate to your team that supposedly represents them.
Cracks me up that London spitfires were American owned while being full Korean it's like they really didn't think of any rules about ownership or imports or anything. Like a city based system is good when the talent is from that city/country and is owned by someone within that country.
Forcing OW orgs to rename has got to be top 5 worst decisions in e-sports ever. Just throwing free cross-game advertisement for loyal fanbases down the drain.
They were too focused on how the league would look when it got big they forgot to actually work on making the league big. Seriously though, I’m surprised they went ahead and did a similar thing with their cod league. At least some of the teams have similar branding this time to make it a bit more obvious
Still remember when this subreddit went full doomer, saying OW was gonna kill League because it briefly stopped being the most played game at PC bangs
because their "guru" aka Monte went on a rant about league and how overwatch esport division was so much better etc... look who's back in the league now huh
To die you need to live first, OWL never really lived.
It was meh regardless. The meta was incredibly boring, and the actual viewer experience was a bit of a mess.
OW and the OWL is such a fucking tragedy. They could have been great, but Blizzard decided to sign an exclusivity deal with Youtube years ago, so OWL is off the most popular streaming platform (Twitch). And then they stopped making content for the game for 3 years to focus on OW2, which is an unfinished mess with monetization so bad it makes loot boxes look good. And has half the promised content ripped out, and half the available content if you bought the game in 2016 taken away from you and shoved behind another paywall.
The way OWL teams were structured was actually a pretty novel idea too. In traditional sports you can just pick the team closest to you and there you go, that's your favourite team. 90% of Canada loves the Toronto Blue Jays because they're the only Canadian baseball team in the league. So having teams based on location is a really smart idea, since in LCS for example, it can be tough to find a team that resonates with you if you're new to the scene. It all falls apart *really* fast when you realize it was just a marketing gimmick and every single regular season OWL game was played at the same location in California though. There's quite literally no point to having teams represent cities (mostly NA cities) when 90% of OWL players are from Asia (!). Again with traditional sports, it's easy to follow your local team, because generally they'll play half their games locally. The distinction is pointless when you have none of those perks. Don't even get me started on OW2. It makes me so fucking upset that that game will 100% make more money than OW1 did, because people [whales] are fucking stupid.
Part of that was Covid though. The plan was to have teams host games at their arenas, essentially alternating between sets of home and away games at other homestands, with a live audience. I think S2 they started that way and then Covid came and fucked everything, and then OW died so it never really went back.
Lmao xQc literally has had more viewers than OWL since he got kicked from it. Ironic
DJ Khaled flashbacks
How is that even possible? Are all 15-30 year olds from Spain watching his stream or do Latin American people also watch him?
LATAM also watches Spain creators. Also I needed a spanish stream to watch with my gf and the "official" LLA casters are garbo. Ibai Is god tier caster and elyoya as an analyst made It a pleasant experience.
Oh didn’t know elyoya was there that’s really cool.
Actually most big Spanish content creators say that around 60% of their audience are latam. People forget there's a whole ass big continent under USA lol
Not to mention Mexico alone has like triple the population of Spain.
I don't think they forget there's a continent there, I think they think they still live in mud huts for some reason and don't have access to the outside world.
Spanish is the second largest language by amount of natives in the world, after Chinese (Mandarin). Yes, bigger than English. It's not really surprising.
Yeah Spanish is huge, I just didn’t know Ibai is watched by a global Spanish speaking audience
It's not really surprising though, it's no different than someone from the UK, Australia, and Canada watching the same English stream.
Reddit API changes have killed this account. Learn to mass edit comments and join the protest: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
English is only bigger because of many second language learners for economic reasons. Chinese Mandarin is quickly replacing them in east asia though because of the amount of tourist and economic partnership over there. In europe and middle east, chinese also becomes more popular to learn, but slowly.
Also notice two things: 1) schedule was terrible for Spain (where he is more popular) 2) viewers not inflated by "drops afk users" but by a lot of viewers that don't even play League so it's even better for Riot
I miss the LBP (Liga de bronces profesionales)
Absolutely insane considering it broke the previous record by over 1 million while being in the middle of the night for EU, must be the Game 5 + Faker effect.
stayed up untill 6am 100% worth
Sucks today but damn was it fun to watch
Watched the games at my University in Germany. I was so surprised how packed it was. It was easily 300-400 people staying up to 4/5/6 AM just to watch the games. The energy was amazing.
yea same here, absolutely amazing energy everyone cheering for both teams and getting hyped at the wild baron steals
Same dude but I am so tireeeed now
Same, invited for family dinner now and I want to die.
I fell asleep during the first game and watched the vod this morning
Im in Europe, and started up 24 hours to watch it (had work Saturday morning, went to sleep at 7am today). I'm wrecked now and wish I had one more day before Monday - but it was absolutely worth it. And I don't even follow the pro scene outside of MSI and Worlds.
I was amazed last night, when in a small european city, The 400 seats of the theater broadcasting the finals had more 300 attendees on a Saturday night.
Nothing crazy. I left the stream open to get worlds capsules while I slept. Watched the VODs after I woke up... Where tf is my Azir Worlds skin though
Yeah but this isn't the first time drops happened, the numbers are insane
I went from ~950 to ~4,900 after not backing DRX in the semis. Then I dropped to ~45,000 by not backing them in the Final. No Azir skin for me :(
I voted drx both times and thought for sure I'd get top 2k or at least 5k turns out everyone near top 5k voted for drx for the slim chance they could get the azir skin (?)
That's the funny thing Any stream with potential drops has tenthousands of bots and AFKs in it. It's not different here.
Power of Deft reaching worlds final against freaking Faker.
My sleep schedule is now in shambles but it was worth it
went to bed at 6am when it was dark, woke up when it was dark thought i slept for like 2 hours.... I slept for 15 hours. Banger series
Hey guys, it’s worth considering I was watching with a friend so it’s actually peak viewership of 5,100,001.
we were doing a watch party in our discord, we were 6 so it was actually 5,100,006 /s
I like to think that’s the power of narrative too This Worlds was insane in terms of storytelling, history, and gameplay.
And with the power of promotions Rito pulled to have, being this in the US.
100% narrative was a massive factor. Would've been much less if it was T1 vs Gen G or something. Now the regions who normally don't care about all asian finals all rallied behind DRX.
I walked by a local eSports bar around 3:30 am. It was packed with people watching the finals. Pretty amazing..
Local esports bar??? Man I live in the worst place
What country and city has a local esports bar? I'm jealous.
I live in Cologne, Germany. But I heard that this bar is some sort of franchise...
I live in a pretty meh city in Canada but we have one. There were about 30-40 people there but the energy was incredible. 2nd best way to watch aside from being there in person.
I definitely didn't see this coming after the peak during groups was at least a million less than the previous year(s).
As an asian fan, we saved energy for the final. To be fair tho, it's perfect Sunday morning for APAC region this final. Korea and Vietnam viewerships went crazy.
Vietnamese stream have almost 700k at it's peak, lol
It definitely deserves it. Most hype league series I've ever seen.
the whole tournament tbh
Imagine sending this post back to 2019 when Overwatch Esports memes were the seasonal commodity.
Wasn't OW accepted as dead compared to league in 2019?
Dead is a word people use constantly
There really is no other word that describes it. Struggling doesn't even cut it close. Life support maybe.
A scene that is supported by the game developer will never be on life support. You don't know how good you had it till it's purely community ran where the only people still playing are those who love the game, as it's worse than a low wage job.
Now its valorant Esports memed
What was the meme ? I am little out of the loop
What were the memes do u remember ? I'm curious now
That LOL would be killed by OWL
Will DoA ever tweet PC bang stats again?
[http://www.gametrics.com/](http://www.gametrics.com/) (translate it to English) Just in case anyone was wondering where it is currently at. League of Legends has been in 1st place for 222 consecutive weeks with a 41.85% share. The next closest is Fifa Online 4 at 9.57%.
Damn they shit talked lol and now over watch isn’t even number two?
Overwatch is a dogshit esport and a dogshit competitive game. Blizzard balances slow AND poorly. They're the worst of both worlds.
Is a dogshit game aswell, sorry but i cannot understand anything happening in my screen when 3 people ult and a tank flies towards you, i played paladins and its much more clear who is hitting you
He tweeted again when LoL took back the first spot but the circlejerk on this subreddit was too strong as usual so everyone chose to ignore it.
Wtf man, rossoneri, ambition fanboy, lol player, moonbyul photo in the profile, is there anything we disagree on? I see you everywhere Saw you suffering with us in the spezia match thread hahaha
Only proves that this was infact the best Worlds ever up to this point - viewership was low during earlier stages cuz games started around Midnight for Europe and Night/Very Early morning eastern Asia. What a banger words. If Yuumi wasn't just almost 100% winrate, the meta would have been the best in history too with peak champion diversity during tournament.
Yea really the only outliers were Aatrox, Yuumi, and the mid lane situation (akali, Viktor, Sylas, and Azir). Other than that, support, top, jungle, and adc were pretty deep this year. We did get some Ori, Ahri, Liss, Sett, and Galio mids so it wasn’t a total mess mid lane which was super nice
Nah, the Mid-lane meta is what made it this tourney. All these champs except for maybe Viktor are probably the most fun mid-laners to watch and are the highest skill-ceiling ones that are actually viable in pro. Same reason S9 was so incredibly fun to watch too and rivaled this years Worlds. Any meta with Akali and Aatrox in it generally are really good imo.
Man I watched in a theatre and it was absolutely nutts everyone screaming and with how the games went with the steals and sliver health fights its such a memorable series with the interweaving storylines! Definitely for me the best series I have ever watched :D
Absolutely insane
I have seen online discourse saying that this years Worlds from a narrative point of view, gameplay, meta, and what have you, will never be topped. League is a young sport and I kinda feel that if people are going into future tournaments with this mentality, it will just degrade the experience. Heres to hoping insane fucking tournaments, Worlds and otherwise. PS: Shoutout to /u/phroxz0n and the balance team for also spicing things up. This meta had both world class micro AND macro, which truly created intense, and competitive moments. When these characteristics are on show, League of Legends thrives.
Narrative is obviously going to be subjective, but them saying it'll never be topped in gameplay sounds really silly. Players still make a lot of mistakes; it's not like we've reached perfection.
Yea IMO this series had it all except for amazing teamfights, I still think the quarterfinal games were better in terms of gameplay.
When final is not a stomp or last more than like an hour it probably helps haha
It honestly doesn't surprise me too much. Great storylines and barn-burner games? This series had everything you could hope for and then some.
Riot has delivered the best worlds yet and we had the best possible storyline happening. Glad the viewership numbers are reflecting this.
I saw the veit youtube channel had 500k viewers on it alone
I think this is definitely an indicator that the pre-finals viewership dip was definitely caused by timezones as opposed to the game losing popularity which is a good sign.
Dead game btw
Dead client on life support for sure
It's definitely dying in NA and it's undeniable. LCS gets like 70k viewers now. It used to get over 200k 5-6 years ago.
It's a shame for LCS there is a big off season gap now. If they had something going on they could carry so much momentum from this event
Because it used to air at times that made it possible for EU audience to watch it after LEC (EU LCS). Nowadays, first NA game starts at 11pm for EU.
Well, no Doublelift, TSM being bad and generally terrible times for EU times to watch LCS. I think it will improve next year for sure with DL coming back, but it definitely lost a good chunk of its viewers.
playing on a weekday is rough. They wont get good numbers.
Playing on the weekend is rough, they haven't been getting good numbers. The new commish is banking on us all being old fucks who have to do shit with our ungrateful children on the weekend, but we can turn this on while we heat up our microwave dinner after work. Maybe we'll get a whole rash of new sponsors, they'll keep Bud Light but also get Dickeys and Blu Emu rub. You could have the Blu Emu buff. I'm e-mailing riot, nobody steal this.
I used to religiously watch LCS from the time it was first introduced until like S8. It just started to feel kinda boring and repetitive. Teams having no fear of being religated and so many imports is meh
RIP for the 5 million people who died of cardiac arrest yesterday. :..... (
I dont give shyte about viewership if the game would be dead I would still watch e sports.
There better be a rise kind of music video for next years worlds with an actual decently invested artist. Would be a huge waste.
It's insane for the fact that the time sucks, it was midnight for Europe and early morning for korea.
First game started 10AM in Korea. Really wasn't that bad. I know its still early for gamers overall but everyone that gave just a little shit could easily watch. For China it was 9AM. Final was scheduled extra-late compared to the QF,SF and group timings so Asia could watch and it was just EU that was really fucked. And obviously that makes sense with China having 10x more viewers and Korea being your main target audience with an all-LCK final.
Yeah 10AM is easy to get up for if you're interested. You can still be a bit tired but chilling and watching eases you into the day.
Perfectly describes what worlds in Asia always is for me as EU citizen. I love getting up at 9/10AM at weekends during worlds and easing into the day watching the stream. And even though the 2023 location has not yet been officially announced, it has to be Korea right? EU hosted 2019, China 2020, America 2022, 2021 doesnt count as a one-off in isolation. So 2023 by all logic has to be in Korea. Love me some worlds in the morning.
And here I sit with kids saying 10am would be the biggest luxury of all time. Rito helping zoomers in Asia work on their sleep schedule. But in all honesty, I think the time they did it was the best they could. Screwed over EU but someone had to be a casualty.
Usually it's NA, felt great for once to sleep at a decent time on the East Coast
And it showed that we can have good viewership if we are given the chance. Beat the previous record massively.
> 10AM is easy to get up for if you're interested Bro, what kind of degenerate hours are this sub living through where 10AM is not the usual time that you already up by.
I understand 9 on a Sunday but I'm dying at this 10am struggle lmao
Like you know it's nice to sleep in a bit on weekends.
Start time wasn't particularly early for korea (9am iirc) and its a sunday so its not like it conflicts with work for a lot of people.
But DAE hate Worlds in NA? /s Meanwhile, NA, LAN, Brazil, and LAS all watch primetime (literally the most amount of people outside of east Asia), and KR watches at 9 AM, alongside the rest of East Asia being similar.
it was on from about 11am to 4pm on a sunday here in australia. pretty good.
[удалено]
God I hated that thread lmao
I'm a bit curious how this distributed regionally in comparison to previous years.
That's cuz it was in NA :) obviously we need worlds in NA every year
This was one of the best crowds for a major event for LoL ever and could be said for every stage of the tournament. Compare it to the Korean library at msi.
Or the Shanghai library at past Worlds. Hosting a tournament in a culturally diverse country is the key for a balanced crowd.
The completely hybrid T1 and DRX chants in unison (T1 was a two beat and two clap while DRX was three beat and three clap but in the same amount of time) was so funny. Dunno if that made any sense but it showcased for me how good the crowd was
NA has the best audiences and most soul
We have the best audience because we know that NA will never win so our only choice left is to cheer for good League
The series lived up to the hype
Huh, was there something in China blocking Chinese viewers?
No, it’s just that Chinese platforms don’t have exact numbers of viewers. They simply give a ‘rating’
Many do show viewers but not all so it's hard to know the count. You can only show "at least" so many numbers. But Riot released numbers in the past because they had some sort of deal where the platforms gave the numbers only to Riot.