I’m trying to work this out. You either have a keen interest in e-sports and read these articles thoroughly. Or you just read them in the hope of finding naughty bits.
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that’s a relief
Thanks for the update. I was wondering what our new roster was going to look like. Pitty about Rogue, i think he was a good team player, which seems to be undervalued. We should be locking in Mimic & Ryoma after last seasons perfomances. Wilder was a nice suprise as well after BalKhan left. If we can get a good bot lane comp going I think we will be very compeditive.
I did some more scouting around the roster changes for the offseason.
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Old boy BalKhan has walked out on his Turkish team (Galatasaray Esports) due to not being paid for about the entirety of the half-year he just played/worked for them.
Yikers. That’s horrible.
It does not seem to be a team-wide thing, but apparently, a Belgium player who played for Galatasaray in Split 1 was also not paid for over 4 months employment!!
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If none of the roster gets paid, or there’s massive management issues, RIOT steps in and suspends or shuts down the club. Does not seem to be the case here.
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More scouting news.
Big rumor that Ry0ma will be moving to American league (LCS) for 2020
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I’ve been watching some twitch streams from FBI, who plays for GGS (Golden Guardians) in LCS.
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LCS means (League Championship Series). It is the North American league. All the regions have their own names for their leagues.
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Ours is OPL (Oceanic Pro League) representing OCE (Oceanic).
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Interestingly, FBI’s been practicing the off-season in duo-queue with Ry0ma, who I presume is over in America with FBI at the GGS training facilities. Quite a lot of practice games going on.
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However, the big rumor is Ry0ma will end up on another LCS team; 100T (100 Thieves).
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Now, also interesting. An old time native commentator from OCE is a guy nicknamed PapaSmithy. He’s had a legendary career as a League commentator (too old to be a player) in OPL and LCK (Korea League). He has just retired from commentator to take the General Manager position (a la Eddie McGuire) at 100T.
So possible, that he knows Ry0ma from OCE days, and that may play a part in recruiting him. If he’s the GM, he can do what he wants with the team roster.
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LCS trade window starts on 2019/11/18 4 PM American time, so that’s still in the future. Might see some news soon.
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LCS is very slightly loosening their rules for import players in 2020, so that might mean 1 or 2 more OCE players end up in America.
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Rumor that an old OCE player, Shernfire, might get to America too. (Personally, I’d like to see Bombers make him an offer, but he has a really bad behavior record, so we won’t)
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Such a terrible decision
To summarize this;
RIOT Games (e.g. the AFL) is officially ending support funding for all OPL teams (e.g. Gold Cost).
Industry sources say they are “disappointed, but not surprised”, as they “knew that the funding would end sooner or later”.
RIOT has been propping up OPL, since the league’s inception in 2015.
It’s definitely going to hurt the league, as smaller teams have almost no money behind them to start with.
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Also, as part of the funding cut, “… Riot Oceania and … the OPL agreed to remove the minimum player salary requirement. … OPL players were previously required to be paid a minimum of $10,000 a year, … The new rules mean OPL players are not guaranteed to be paid at all.”
What this probably means:
- Teams will continue to pay their core/starting roster similar or a bit lower wages, since they don’t want to lose those players to other teams.
- Fringe players /subs/rookie/ may not get paid at all, and will be part-timers and amateurs.
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I presume that OPL teams and organisations were anticipating that something like this would happen, but possibly not as early as this/next year.
It could well have been part of Riot’s strategy, eg a 5 year plan. Riot may have planned to subsidise the OPL an “emerging” region for the initial 5 year period (2015-2019,) but after that the money would be cut off. During those initial 5 years of subsidy Riot expected teams to grow their own income streams through sponsorships\memberships\merch etc so they become no longer reliant on subsidy and would become self sustaining. Sadly, a lot (if not all) of the OPL teams haven’t managed to achieve that.
How’s it impact our team?
I note the article says were better placed because we have deeper pockets to find the shortfall. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. How much $ are we exactly losing.
Could be a double-edged sword. Sure, we’ll likely have to put more money in. But on the other hand, there’ll be fewer good teams in the opl because most independent teams will lose players or have their players be forced to go part time. So our team (assuming we continue to fund a full-time team) will be more likely to make it to world-level competition where sponsorship $ etc are easier to come by.
Or that’s the theory. I’ve always been pretty unsure of the strategy for actually getting the esports team to result in a positive cash flow for the club, to be honest.
Back to the scouting news.
League’s global free agency period opened on Monday (so it’s been about 1 week) and there has been an absolute avalanche of trading news in Europe and North America.
… And practically ZERO news in Oceanic.
A bit of context information; In global League, I’d say there are 3 powerhouse regions:
- (KR) Korea (LCK) (League of Legends Champions Korea)
- (CN) China (LPL) (League of Legends Pro League)
- (EU) Europe (LEC) (League of Legends European Championship)
North America is widely considered the 4th strongest region, but it is not at the same level as the top 3:
- (NA) North America (LCS) (League of Legends Championship Series)
We are somewhere around 11th of 13 regions.
- (OCE) Oceanic (OPL) (Oceanic Pro League)
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The 10 teams in LCS and 10 in LEC have basically announced all their new rosters in the first week.
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On average, about 50% of people in the team’s 5 playing positions and 1 head coach position will change between 2019 and 2020.
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That’s at least 60 personnel in each league, and teams will probably sign 2-4 substitute players too.
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- BMR Ry0ma has been confirmed by ESPN to be moving to LCS’s 100T (100 Thieves). Though there has still not been any official announcement from team or player.
My read on this is that 100T are possibly still looking to sign another mid-laner. If he’s better than Ry0ma, then Ry0ma will be demoted to the Academy team.
If they can’t find anyone else, Ry0ma becomes the starter.
Much of the fan chatter on reddit is people assuming Ry0ma will not be the starter because they assume anyone else is better than an Oceanic player.
Me, I think he’ll do fine. He’s good enough to start in LCS.
If anyone wants to look it up.
- Ry0ma’s current account on the NA SoloQ server is “MID321”
- FBI’s account is “ADCADC123”
- FBI’s twitch channel is “FBIADC”
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- MMM Destiny has been announced as moving to the LEC team OG (Origen). This is big.
They are based in Denmark. MMM is Mammoth and they won the OPL Split 2 of 2019 and represented OCE at Worlds. Desinty is the Support position player.
This announcement caused a lot of shock for 2 reasons:
- OG under-performed in LEC last season (8th in split 2). So they then recruited a superteam for 2020, cherry-picking top-2 EU players at the ADC and Jungle position. Spending big to land the big fish.
- Destiny is from OCE. 11th region stepping up to 3rd region.
Origen had announced 4 of their 5 starters in an European superteam, and then thy followed it up with announcing an OCE support. (OCE is basically a joke/meme region in the eyes of the rest of the World.)
Many people are just ??? because no one knows how well Destiny will fare in EU. (The general assumption is he’s going to be mincemeat/scapegoat.)
This has one-upped BMRs. FBI and Ry0ma getting the call to NA is impressive.
Desinty getting the call to EU is “Wth, how did he manage to convince the GM of Origen that he was good enough to play in EU?”.
This makes it a massive year for OCE with us exporting 3 players to stronger regions.
Amazing. (Prior to 2019, I think only 1 OCE player was ever exported.)
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- BMR Wilder has announced in twitter that BMRs will not be renewing his contract. So he is leaving.
That’s it, boys. We (BMRs) are blowing up the team again.
Looch hasn’t tweeted anything, but I don’t expect him to return. He gives me Leuenberger vibes (he’s has enough of this.)
So that’s 4 of the 5 starters probably gone. (Rogue, Ry0ma, Wilder, Looch). on top of (FBI and BalKhan) that we lost earlier in the year.
Rollercoaster. If all we have left is Mimic, it’s going to be a very different team next year.
I really do like Mimic and I hope we re-sign him.
Still, if we are blowing up the team anyway, our list manager might find a way to recruit a new batch of 5 players with pre-existing connections/synergy?
I’ve completely no idea.
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Checking over Leaguepedia; since Monday:
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EU has announced about 12 new starter positions
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NA has announced about 20 new starter positions
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OCE has announced 0 new starters. (13 starter delistings, 14 academy delistings)
Urgh. What’s going on? Does OCE just wait around for every other league to finish their negotiations, and we pick up the leftovers?..
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Last one;
- Rumor for former DW Shernfire to Team Liquid Academy (North America).
Good Jungler. He is probably far too good to be in OPL any more.
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WRT the cuts, I have nfi how much we’re talking. The impact for other teams is that they may no longer be able to afford “gaming houses” to train together which tends to lead to poorer play. Our team trains in a room at the Hangar, so that’s less of an issue for us. Also, if teams can’t afford to pay players as much, players might need to seek an alternative income, which divides their attention, so less time for training, so they don’t perform as well.
I know breaking up the team is not a good thing for us, but that said, with Balkhan coming in, being MVP for season then going to Turkey, FBI going to Golden Guardians last season (gave me an excuse to follow a LCS team) and now Ry0ma going to the 100T, it starts to create an image of the Bombers being a “destination club” as a stepping stone to make it to the “big league” (where the real money is; top players in the LCS are on 7 figures.)
Looking at the list of free agents for LCS\LEC (where there is a chance of English communication) and the LPL and LCK, TBH I think we’d struggle to afford their leftovers, especially now that the minimum salary has been removed. We’ll probably have to pick someone out of solo queue, like we did with Balkhan.
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Shern is known to be toxic and selfish, fine for a soloqueue player (really good actually) but attitude issues can cause problems
I heard it was in solo queue that he made his indiscretions that ultimately led to him being dropped.
His indiscretions were due to ELO boosting (RIOT enforced ban) and flaming/griefing on KR server when training for worlds (another riot ban resulting in his team having to use sub jungler for worlds playin games)
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Thanks for all the update @Ritsujin. Love all your research. As a casual watcher and bad player this keeps me much better connected with our lads (whoever they end up being for next year haha)
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So, has this thing turned a profit for the club so far?