The Forge of Champions has just recently wrapped up, bringing together the best of UK League of Legends at the LVP Studios in Barcelona, and we talked to Riot's Head of UK Esports Mo Fadl about the competition, which he says went very well for the team.
"In the first few weeks when they opened up the open brackets already and we had thousands of players signing up to play against the pro teams, we realised 'hey wait, there's something happening that we didn't understand'. We didn't even [think] something like this could happen - we had some issues with our backend system in the first place - and then the viewership, interaction numbers, everything is like triple, four, five times higher than anything we've ever had before in the UK," he explained.
We also asked Fadl about what he wants to tweak moving forward, to which he said:
"We want to focus on entertainment a lot, like moving away from the traditional esports being cold and very sporty, and be more entertaining, try new styles with the stream, be very, very testy - we're open for tests completely - and focus on the entertainment factor more than the sports factor. We can see it resonates very, very well with a wider audience, and based on this [...] we said our learning was 'hey guys we have to even go deeper, we have to work with influencers, with Twitch, with YouTube [...] we have to make it inclusive to the players who want to participate."
Were you happy with Forge of Champions?