Me looking for the great developments in Tier 2. Are they in the room with us?
This tweet might get me in trouble, but it has to be said.
The game/development side of Riot does a good job (in my opinion) of interacting with the community, people like Phreak, Drew, Phroxzon and August all are online interacting with people for better or worse.
I'm willing to bet you have no idea who any of the EMEA Esports Rioters are because they hide behind Sheep Esports puff pieces and only start to interact when things are really bad.
Andrey Korshunov is the Esport Product Manager responsible for Tier 2 in EMEA. The only time we have ever spoke was when Leagues GG collapsed and we had no idea if we would have a league to play in. Even then we would have to wait weeks for responses.
The most interesting words he said were, when asked if Riot would be able to help fund the broadcast/split:
"If we (Riot) were to fund the ERLs we would only be able to fund five" - Andrey Korshunov.
We have been sold a great lie by Riot Esports that Tier 2 is semi-professional. Riot will not fund broadcasts or leagues but the expectation is that broadcasts are run to a reasonable standard with no volunteers and teams must maintain a competitive standard with no funding.
So who funds it if not Riot? It's the greater fools, either us as passionate owners, or TOs, or the sponsors TOs convince to come on board.
We as owners, TOs, players, and fans are stakeholders of Tier 2, we invest our time and money into this product, yet the product manager responsible for managing our product has zero meaningful communication with us, and to Riot we are seen as a nuisance. A cash cow, a useful idiot. We are the ones who keep Tier 2 afloat.
There are major issues in Tier 2 right now:
- Broadcasts for tournaments are being run with no funding, Riot expects people like
@The_EUniverse to cover EMEA Masters and Gamechangers for free.
- We're getting cool events like an international, but from conversations I have had, teams are having to cover all the expenses to get players to Korea.
- Decisions are being made to schedule EMEA Masters at 3pm, when a significant chunk of players have 'real' jobs.
- Prize pools and funding is completely non existant. To actually build a roster that could compete in EMEA and World Stars, you'd have to spend between 30-50k EUR just on player salaries and your prize for winning World Stars is $20k USD.
- Prediction Markets are for all intents and purposes are gambling, yet some players and coaches have been allowed these sponsorships, and others have been rightfully sanctioned under Riot's Global Esports Code of Conduct.
- And of course the big elephant in the room, matchfixing (which has increased with the increased presence of prediction markets).
This is just some of the issues, there are many more.
There are creative solutions that could have been put in place to help fund Tier 2.
GRID is selling all competitive data from Tier 2 to Polymarket and other groups, I know Riot is getting a cut of this, so where is the cut for Tier 2? After all its our data.
Riot won't fund Tier 2, so it won't develop.
They created the TO system as a middleman between Riot and teams/players/fans, so that when things go bad because of Riot's own mismanagement and negligence towards Tier 2, their hands are clean and the TO always gets scapegoated.
The real question is, why are we (teams, players, talent, fans) never asked for our input on the direction of Tier 2? We are the major stakeholders, keeping the scene alive by investing time and money, yet we are given no say in the path our ecosystem takes.
I've met two types of people in esports:
Passionate people with a love of the scene
and
Vampires who want to suck the decaying corpse of Tier 2 dry and extract as much money as possible from the scene.
Riot only seems to want to listen to and cater to the latter.
(Sorry for the long rant, screenshot it incase I get told by Riot to delete it)