How LCS Teams Can Revive Solo Queue Interest- LoL #2
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For many years the top complaint of pro players, streamers and the vocal minority of the League of Legends community has been the quality of their solo queue. There’s a myriad of valid complaints, and at core it’s “not taking it seriously enough”. By now it’s become something that so many have voiced for years without any meaningful change that it’s accepted it will stay this way. That would be true, if no one did anything about it. So I’ll propose something that can be done.
During every international tournament there is massive interest in the host region’s solo queue. Streams, highlight videos, and spectating solo queue becomes must watch content. The combination of the best players from around the world on the same server is the appetizer to MSI or Worlds. But solo queue content isn’t only popular during international tournaments. Most personal streams are solo queue games, highlights and spectating is constantly generating a large audience on Twitch and YouTube. There is a market for solo queue content 24 hours a day, every day. My solution is a 24/7 Spectate Solo Queue stream that features the top matches in NA Challenger. Since it’s not an opportunity that Riot will likely allow a single team to capitalize upon, all teams and Riot can get involved with it anyway they want. All of these parties should be interested in the improvement of solo queue anyhow.
Once approved and teams come to an agreement the next question is who’s to run it? The minimum would be 3 people running 8 hour shifts with a decent PC and strong internet connection. I propose instead that each team supply it’s analysts, scouts or interns to run it. This is something they should already be doing, so the value to a team is obvious. Of course there probably won’t be a consensus to get this done, so you can add more or less people, and even get to a point where you can start to automate the spectating.
Scouts can not only serve their interests, but also determine who may be trolling and collect names. If there is an overwhelming number of LCS supplied personnel agreeing that a certain player is sabotaging a game, they should have the collective power to punish accordingly. Observation will often lead to better player behavior, sometimes it does the opposite, but this is where the collective authority should step in.
Now you’ve got a monitored running stream of a few matches a day, but how do you incentivize the people with aspirations to try harder who are not being spectated? Of course knowing that LCS scouts will watch these specific games if they get there works, but so does money. Using the revenue from the stream, or from a collective pool supplied by the LCS teams, you award prize money to the top players that are currently not in an LCS org. Since in many of these games the there will be LCS players, content teams can use the stream to highlight and clip their player’s plays, generating content for their channels that will be cheaper to produce and more compelling than most of what they are currently producing.
NA is not doomed, we haven’t played to our strengths, two which are streamer culture, and a lot of money. Connect the two, use it to our advantage. There is a lot of money but it’s not being spent in creative ways. I refuse to say that this region is doomed until we exhaust every option we can think of that we haven’t tried before. Now if we try this and you show me that teams aren’t willing to work together to solve a problem that is affecting all of them, and that Riot doesn’t see this as something even worth trying, then at least we will know one more way not to solve the issue.
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The burden shouldn't lie on the teams to do this, it should fall onto Riot. The idea itself is interesting but I see it more as a supplement idea rather than the actual solution. You pinpointed the problem as it's the culture of the NA server. Honestly if riot would be more strict with punishments then the culture would change drastically. Start banning people for multiple offenses. These people aren't bringing any good to your game anyways. I promise you, if they start banning after 2 games of afk, trolling, griefing, etc then the stuff would stop real quick. The fact that people can get away with doing the stuff is the real problem, not the fact that kids are acting like kids. I don't expect Riot to do anything though, people have been complaining about the ping for years and they still haven't managed to come up with a better solution.