The First Robins: When LANs are Coming Back to Esports
Yuriy SheremetUnlike regular kind of sports that have most suffered from the coronavirus and measures limiting its spread, esports have become even more popular: tournaments continue taking place changing the mode into online so the viewership has grown up.
After all, an online tournament has nothing in common with a real LA: it does not have this atmosphere and the value of the victory is not so high. The audience misses LANs, so now it is time to think about holding them — even if there will be no spectators there. Let’s talk about the nearest tournaments that may happen offline.
ESL One: Cologne 2020
The Counter-Strike tournament has to kick off on 6 July but it was put off till 23 August due to the restriction to host mass events in Germany. Rescheduling is unlikely to happen but the format still raises many questions: ESL count on holding the LAN but if the teams will not be able to come to Cologne due to the restrictions (and this is quite expectable), the participants will have to play online. In this case, we are going to see several online tournaments in different regions instead of one.
ESL Pro League Season 12
And again CS. The eleventh season of the league moved to online but the organization wants to hold the twelfth one as a LAN. It is planned on 2 September and the situation here is almost the same as with the tournament above — nothing is clear yet but there is a lot of time ahead and it means that everything will go according to plan. If the LAN does not take place, ESL will hold three online championships: one for both Americas, the second one for Europe and the third one for Asia.
ESL One Rio 2020
Another CS tournament by ESL. It had to happen in May but was rescheduled to November – from 9 to 22. Due to the cancellations of the other CS majors, so it was the only one in 2020. It is unusual for this discipline and it raised its status dramatically – now it is unequivocally the main tournament of the year. Besides, it will be held as a LAN so all the fans are looking forward to it.
Other Organizers and Disciplines
We have covered all news about CS and talked about the tournaments of one organizer — ESL. The others have not presented detailed plans for the rest of the year. This first robin makes us suppose that the others will follow it. Many things will depend on how the first LANs will go on. As for the other DreamHack CS tournaments, Open Rotterdam 2020 has not been canceled yet — its starts is planned on 16 October, Open Winter 2020 is still expected to happen on 27 November.
World Championship, the main League of Legends tournament of the year, seems not to suffer a lot. The government of Shanghai where the event is supposed to take place has confirmed that the preparation is going according to plan. If nothing unexpected will happen, it must happen this year but the date is not set yet.
The situation with The International 10 will be far more difficult. It was rescheduled until further notice the Valve company has not set it even approximately. It said that the dates will be defined after there is confidence that it is possible to organize a safe tournament. There are only insiders’ rumours that TI may be rescheduled to the first months next year. In this case, in 2021 two TI will happen so there is a chance that 2020 will just be skipped and TI will be resumed in 2021. Now when the situation in the world has become calmer, the talks about returning of LAN tournaments came back so anything is possible, even holding TI 10 till the end of the year.
The first major Dota 2 LAN may be ONE Esports Dota 2 Invitational Jakarta. Initially, it was planned in April but it was postponed till April and later till November when it will be joined with another ONE tournament. There was no news about any rescheduling yet so it seems that the plans about its holding are valid. A lot of things will depend on how successfully the first LANs will be going on.
Yuriy Sheremet – Expert in mobile gaming and esports among shooters and MOBA games.
At EGamersWorld, Yuriy, as in 2020 when he joined the portal, works with content, albeit with adjustments to his area of responsibility.