LCS Europe - 3 Days of League of Legends

Photo: Riot Games

Unlike last week, I did not give an update for every day of LCS, this is simply because of the sheer size of LCS, but let me give you a wrap up.

There were 16 teams competing in the League Championship Series, who came from across Europe to compete for one of five spots in this coming pro-season. Unfortunately one team, Team Solo Mebdi, was DQd because of several of their players being perma-banned. And on day one 18 games were played across every group.

Like we've seen in recent tournaments day 1 has been about Round Robin among several groups (four this time). At the end of the day 8 teams move on to day 2. The teams that didn't make it were: TNB, Team Acer, LoLPro, TCM, Anexis, and Team Alternate. The only real surprise here was LoLPro, being Curse's EU team, and after Curse's come back some thought it was time for the European team to shine.

Day 2 is an important day, because we find out four of the five teams that will be going into season 3. Their are four games that are played, and all of them are best of 3 matches. Most of these teams were among safe bets of moving on. FnaticRC came off their amazing games in IEM Katowice to show that they were there for good and won against Meet Your Maker. The team from Denmark, Copenhagen Wolves, once again showed their prowess in beating Millenium 2-0 to move on. Against all Authority and Giants! gaming also moved on.

Day 3 is exciting because you have four teams vying for one final spot. Meet Your Maker and DragonBorns both won their first matches 2-0 to move on to the final match of the entire tournament. In a strong set of two games DragonBorns continued their momentum of their first match to win the final spot.

It was a long and exciting weekend to say the least, and it shows that we're to get an amazing Season 3 of profession League of Legends. One thing we can say about the coming season from LCS NA,  LCS Eu, IEm Katowice is that the competition this year is tight. These teams are so evenly matched that we're going to see some crazy games, upsets, and interesting new game meta. I can't wait!

League of Legends is Getting a Mac Client

On the official forums and on Reddit it was officially announced that Riot has been working on a Mac client and it is starting public beta testing today. Have a mac and want to try the public beta now? Today is your only chance, sign up for a PBE account here, and then download the client once you're all setup.

Riot used to have a Mac client but it was buggy, to say the least, and it was pulled in September of 2011. Luckily the majority of Mac LoL players have been benefiting from the amazing iLoL client created by Boompje and his team. Other have used parallels or bootcamp, but as nice as any of these options are nothing will be as nice as a real client from Riot. The non-beta client can't come soon enough but Rioter Udyr has noted that it might still be a little bit until that will happen. Until then I'm going to use the beta, and if you miss the window get iLoL and get to playing.

If you're a fan of iLoL and boompje, do not worry, he already has plans in the works once his first product becomes obsolete. The future plans include a Linux client, recording program across platforms, and other nifty little tools.






Rioter Udyr ended his post with this, and I have to agree:

Thanks to the Mac community for your extraordinary patience – and a very special thanks to a particularly astounding group of folks who helped many of you play League via an unofficial client over the past months.

P.S. Huge thanks to the Cross Platform team for their hard work!

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IEM Katowice- Day 2 & 3

Gambit Gaming is back!

 Coming off of a thrilling first day, IEM Katowice had much even more exciting games lined up in day 2 and 3. Stream technical issues and time zone issues aside, let's get to the non-boring stuff.

 

Day 2

Day 2 of the IEM was just about group B of round robin, and this group had three strong names and a Polish team that had a strong show of support. The powerhouse from Korea, Azubu Frost, went 3-0 blowing the competition out of the water. The two well known teams from Europe: Fnatic and SK Gaming, ended up going 2-1 and 1-2 (respectively) with there deciding game being the closest match-up in the tournament. The Polish team Absolute Legend went 0-3, but they still got a lot of love from the crowd.

After both going 1-1 Fnatic and SK Gaming faced off in the second to last game of the day. In a 55 minutes match it was ultimate decided by a nexus rush, with xPeke from Fnatic outplaying two others at the enemy nexus in order to win the game. Using Kassadin's ultimate in order to dodge a barrage of skills from a Cho'gath and an Olaf, he took down the nexus in an amazing show of talent. Being one of the most emotional of all Pro-LoL players this has to hurt Ocelot, team captain of SK, especially since this isn't the first time a base rush has defeated them (CLG in Season 2 playoffs). A video of the Fnatic vs Sk play can be found here. This jaw-dropping play was the reason xPeke was aptly awarded the MVP for IEM Katowice.

At the end of the day Azubu Frost and Fnatic were the top two from group b and went on to the champion bracket.

Day 3 - Finals

There were only 3 match-ups left, and all of them were best of three, yet only 7 games were needed to decide the winner. The first two match ups were with Azubu Blaze facing off against Fnatic and Azubu Frost going against Gambit Gaming. The Koreans had a strong showing, and after losing to their sister team during day 2 Fnatic lost 2-1 against Azubu Blaze, sending them to the finals. On the other hand, Azubu Frost started the tournament going 3-0 during round robin, but lost in only 2 matches against Gambit Gaming. After barely squeaking into the final round, Gambit Gaming showed why they were a powerhouse in season 2  and won their final match 2-0 against Azubu Blaze.


Gambit Gaming gave their fans everything they needed after being through so much. The newly branded M5 team from Russia found their footing in this tournament; starting off weak and building up momentum.  This allowed them to keep their record of never losing an IEM tournament. Unfortunately this didn't go without a hitch, after winning the final match diamondprox (jungler for Gambit Gaming) made a heat of the moment gesture. He later apologized and stated,

"I consider them as a very strong team. I was really happy about getting a win over them. All of my gestures were not ill mannered, but simply emotions. I was really excited to beat such a strong team more than at any time in my life. Thank you everybody."(sic)

The grammar may seem a little off since it was translated from Russian. Congrats to Gambit for giving such a strong show in their first tournament back and to xPeke for winning MVP.

Day 1 - IEM Katowice

IEM Katowice is a three day tournament starting with two days of round robin play as teams vying for a place into the championship brackets. Day one had a lot of strong play with team Curse coming off their successful gamble to get back into Season 3 during the LCS last week. While this is Gambit Gaming's (GG) first tournament since they left M5 and were sponsored by Gambit, people were interested in seeing how this powerhouse from Season 2 would make there debut. But the real shining light in this group is Azubu Blaze, this #2 ranked Korean team has always shown strong in tournaments and they have been practicing non-stop in recent months. The lesser known Polish team, MeetYourkMakers, had quite a crowd turnout for them (due to the even being in Poland) but unfortunately did not show well against these strong teams from around the world.

At the end of the day Azubu Blaze went 3-0, while the rest of the group ended up going 1-2. The second ranked team also goes on to the championship bracket, and because of this tie the rule of shortest game play kicked into effect and Gambit Gaming was able to squeak into the next stage. The fans seems to be pretty upset that Curse didn't get to move on since they had beaten GG and thought to be a stronger team (at least by them), but Curse's captain Saint Vicious wasn't put down by this loss posting: "I feel confident if we had jacky and boot camped the days before we can take on anyone". Playing without there strong mid NyJacky, due to visa issues, definitely had an impact on there play. Overall these games were impressive but all of these teams will have more opportunities to get into the IEM World Championship over the coming months.

Part two of the round robin starts in just under two hours with SK vs Azubu Frost, and with some more big names about to play today will be another day of great League play, and I'll update you all tomorrow.