Blog Archives
eSports Weekend Calendar: September 19 – 21, 2014
After a week away from League of Legends, it comes back in full force in this week’s eSports Weekend Calendar. It’s the start of the group stages for the 2014 World Championship. The sixteen top teams are playing down for the $1,000,000 championship grand prize. This week is the group stages with the playoff stages next week.
Elsewhere, StarCraft II features the Red Bull Battle Grounds grand final with Red Bull Battle Grounds: Washington tournament. Over in the Dota 2 space, Sina Cup 5 wraps up this weekend with the upper and lower bracket finals on Friday and the Grand Final on Sunday. And ESL One continues its qualifiers for the big New York event at Madison Square Garden.
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eSports Weekend Calendar: August 22 – 24, 2014
If you’re a StarCraft II or League of Legends fan, there is a lot for you to watch this weekend. The road to the Red Bull Battle Grounds Grand Final in Washington continues with their second 128-player open tournament of 2014. The winner will be the final qualifier for the $50,000 event so there’s a lot at stake this weekend in Detroit.
Meanwhile, League of Legends continues the road to the World Championship with the finals of China’s LPL and the start of the North American LCS playoffs.
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Riot Isn’t Interested in Crowdfunding eSports Prize Pools
Just because The International was able to add over $9 million to the prize pool thanks to crowdfunding via sales of the Compendium and ESL boosted their prize pool for ESL One: Frankfurt the same way doesn’t mean that crowdfunding prize pools is for everyone.
Riot Games’ head of European eSports, Jason Yeh, has come out as saying they’re not interested in getting fans to contribute to their World Championship pot with an anonymous employee being a lot more blunt with his opinion.
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eSports Weekend Calendar: August 15 – 17, 2014
This weekend’s eSports calendar is all about Gamescom. Europe’s biggest gaming convention has events for Battlefield 4, Call of Duty, Guild Wars 2, Halo and more. The centrepiece of festivities is the ESL Tournament for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The second in the ESL One line of tournament, ESL One: Cologne features a $250,000 CSGO tournament. ESL also just announced a Dota 2 ESL One tournament for Madison Square Garden later this year. I think that ESL One might quickly become a bigger deal than ESL’s IEM series.
Elsewhere, the EU LCS summer split comes to an end with the final four doing battle at Gamescom. OGN also wraps up its summer season this weekend. There’s also some SC2 and Dota 2 on the calendar this weekend.
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eSports Weekend Calendar: August 8 – 10, 2014
If you’re a MOBA fan, it’s a quiet weekend. The Dota 2 scene might have the joinDOTA League ongoing but it’s hard to get a clear and easy to read schedule for that so keep your eyes peeled for that if that’s you preferred MOBA. League has LPL’s round robin continuing and a bit of EU LCS playoff action but it’s a quiet week otherwise.
StarCraft, on the other hand, is having a big weekend. Proleague is wrapping its 2014 season this weekend with a battle between KT Rolster and SK Telecom. I sometimes wonder if a foreign team leagues would catch on if they weren’t built on the all-kill format (like TeamStory Cup). It’s cool to see all-kills and reverse all-kills but I’d like to see how a big league foreign Proleague effort would play out. Maybe something like teams of four in a best-of-five with an ace match format so you don’t have to have a six-plus man roster to do best-of -sevens.
If SC2 team competitions aren’t your taste, Red Bull is having an six-man qualifier triple-elimination tournament for a spot in the 2014 Red Bull Battle Grounds Grand Final. Taiwan’s best do battle with some of Korea’s best in the Taiwan Open. And the best in the world take on the best on the North American ladder’s best in Destiny I.
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eSports Weekend Calendar: August 1 – 3, 2014
If you’re a League of Legends fan, you’ve probably been doing a lot of stream watching this week. It’s LCS Europe super week and this weekend’s eSports calendar also includes the North American LCS super week. And if you’re a StarCraft fan, we have WCS EU Challenger League and the American qualifier for IEM Toronto. It’s not the busiest weekend ever but there’s still something to watch.
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eSports Weekend Calendar: July 25 – 27, 2014
Now that the two weeks that the eSports world has dedicated to Dota 2 ended with the $5 million Grand Final of The International, what else is there to watch? Okay, we have the eSports calendar to help answer that question but doesn’t it feel, ever so slightly, like a bit of a let down. We go from the biggest tournament in eSports history to a couple of random tournaments and leagues. It’s just not quite as hype.
Anyway, if you’re a StarCraft fan, there’s plenty for you to watch this weekend. GSL Code A is wrapping up for the final time this season. If you’re looking for top-flight Korean action, Jin Air Green Wings and KT Rolster do battle in a Proleague semi-final. Who isn’t excited about the possibility of sOs vs. Zest in a battle of two of the best in the world?
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Can A New MOBA Compete in an Oversaturated Genre?
The International might be taking place right now and it is the biggest eSports tournament in history but it’s far from alone in the MOBA genre. While it’s big, Dota 2 only boasts 9 million monthly players to League of Legends’ 67 million people playing each month. While they’re two of the most popular games in the world, they’re far from the only MOBAs on the block.
Alongside League and Dota is an ever-expanding group of competitors in the MOBA sector. In the last year or so alone, we’ve seen alphas, betas and full releases of Smite, Dawngate, Heroes of the Storm, Infinite Crisis, Dead Island: Epidemic and more. That’s not included the recently announced MOBAs from Gearbox, Crytek and CD Projekt.
With so many MOBAs entering the market against dominating category leaders, do any of these new entries stand a chance and what, if anything, can they do to compete?
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eSports Weekend Calendar: July 10 – 13, 2014
While this weekend’s eSports calendar has the upcoming action in StarCraft and League of Legends, the next two weeks are all about Dota 2 and the rest of eSports is just fighting for what little viewership is left. Yesterday marked the start of The International 2014 for a prize pool of over $10 million. Yesterday was the Phase One qualifier for the 16th spot in the tournament. Through Saturday, it’s the 16-team round robin followed by two days of the Phase Three playoff to get us to the eight-team elimination bracket.
Well, I suppose that’s unless you’re a fighting game fan. This weekend is EVO 2014. The big fighting game convention / tournament starts on Friday in Las Vegas and runs through Sunday.
Elsewhere, SC2 has the semi-finals of the Acer TeamStory Cup and Red Bull Battlegrounds in Atlanta. And League of Legends continues the regular seasons of their top-flight professional leagues.
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eSports Weekend Calendar: July 4 – 6, 2014
If you’re a StarCraft fan, this is a big weekend for you. Both WCS Europe and WCS America are wrapping up 2014 Season Two this weekend which brings us one step closer to BlizzCon and the StarCraft World Championship.
If SC2 isn’t your speed, there’s plenty of action elsewhere. The League Championship Series is holding another super week this week so if you’re looking for more League of Legends action, this is the week for you. There’s even some Dota and Hearthstone action for you this weekend. It’s a busy weekend in the world of eSports. This is why I do this calendar every week.
et geekera 