Gaming

GankStars: Life as international Vainglory players

Who said mobile games weren’t eSports? One MOBA has taken this team from San Diego to Seoul.

Written by Ben Sillis

9 min readPublished on 27.07.2016 · 3:21 UTC

Competitive video games have been a spectator sport for years, but outside of the hyper-competitive world of Pokemon battling, most high profile tournaments and leagues have focused on PC and console games, graphics-hungry first person shooters and MOBAs that need their own bespoke mouse and keyboard.

But times are changing: you can play Hearthstone on an iPhone or Android smartphone now, and if you get good enough at some mobile games, a jetsetting life of international tournaments await. Vainglory, the popular mobile MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) game that plays like Dota 2 for iPad is already in ESL’s current rotation. In South Korea, adopted home of StarCraft and host to League of Legends’ 2014 World Championship, it’s already a televised event, one that’s starting to attract top touchscreen tacticians from all over the globe, despite being less than a year old.

“Vainglory is young; most of us started playing when the game came out as beta in the US last November,” Alex 'PwntByUkrainian' Novosad explains to Red Bull. He’s an iOS engineer living in San Francisco, but he’s also the team manager of GankStars, along with guild co-founder Mari ‘Sphix’ Yanez and and co-leader Hamza 'IraqiZorro' Najim. The guild’s top team, Sirius, recently competed in the Vainglory World Invitational in Seoul, and are planning to return later this year for the game’s first professional broadcast league. Not bad going when everyone in the squad – Hamza ‘IraqiZorro’ Najim from Toronto, Nick ‘CullTheMeek’ Verolla from Boston and Gabe ‘gabevizzle’ Villarin from San Diego – had only begun playing the game a few months ago, let alone met each other.

“We didn't even think about going somewhat competitive until February – there were no tournaments, no leagues, nothing,” Novosad explains. “But we would scrim and sometimes we'd lose, and the more we lost, the more we wanted to get serious. At the time [the rival] Nemesis and Venom guilds were becoming quite competitive and, frankly, we just decided it was time we kicked their asses. We'd trade wins, but as time went on we started having the upper hand. At first that's all it was – friendly scrims to advance the game's meta. We'd never brag about wins publicly, but we enjoyed making strategies and building synergies.”

Gradually, Sirius and GankStars started clocking up wins. Though Vainglory already boasts more than 1.5 million active players every month, they were soon on top of the pile, defeating Nemesis live on stream for the title of North America’s King of the Hill, which they still hold. “That's when you could see those three really coming together as a team,” Novosad says. Sirius then won the VGL North American title in May, and again in June. Almost inevitably, after Sirius conquered the North American servers its focus began to turn international.

Vainglory will be familiar to anyone who has played a MOBA game on PC: there are still enemy bases (crystals) to wreck, jungles to hide in and a host of inventive characters with their own unique power to pick. Some elements have been streamlined to fit on a small touchscreen: there is just one lane, and teams consist of three players rather than five and matches are much shorter. The concept of the game is bite-sized, but crucially, it’s every bit as cerebral as its forebears.

“Vainglory is actually a lot better than either League or Dota as far as entertainment,” Novosad says. “The games are shorter, the use of abilities and strategies in fights is very clear and it's hard to miss anything as a spectator, and the fights can start as fast as 40 seconds into the game and are regular. So you don't have to watch teams farm for 30 minutes before they engage into a single fight. In fact it's very rare to see the whole game last 30 minutes – they're usually between 15 and 20.”

It’s perhaps for this reason the game is starting to find traction as an eSport. In May, ESL began running monthly online tournaments for the game with prize money. Then OnGameNet (OGN), the South Korean eSports cable network, picked it up. Sirius were one of the teams invited to the first Vainglory World Invitational, which was filmed in Seoul earlier this month. Novosad can’t reveal the results of the tournament until the final is aired on 13 August, but as team manager he flew out with the other GankStars, and he saw the studio audience’s reaction first hand.

“OGN invited a bunch of people from the street for VWI – people who didn't know anything about Vainglory. And the crowd went nuts! Every time the two teams were about to fight, every time a hero barely survived death, and even every time a strategic objective was taken, the noise was electrifying."

The team have returned home, but not for long. Next week, qualifiers for OGN’s first competitive televised league will begin, though Sirius have received automatic qualification for the season which starts mid-August and lasts for two months.

“I have three weeks to find the right house, apartment, etcetera. Minor sweat drops are starting to form,” Novosad admits. He hopes to avoid the complications of the team’s first trip to Seoul. Due to complications about the number of parents attending, Novosad only received his visa for travel in time because one keen consulate worker happened to arrive at the office early, and even then he only made his flight with five minutes to spare.

Visas and hotel bookings aren’t the only issue Novosad and other GankStars members face however. Every member of Sirius is still a teenager – Villarin is just 18 – so just making the financial outlay for a months-long tournament and justifying the time while juggling other commitments is a challenge. Vainglory does not have an established career path and salaried teams in the same way Riot ensures for the LCS: there’s no guarantee that the game will still be attracting prize money this time next year. Novosad says the players are embracing this brave new world.

“IraqiZorro has a competitive bone. Today, he has the highest ELO and ranking in Vainglory. But what’s really on the line for him is his future: at 19, he wants to finish school without having to take on a job outside of Vainglory. He hopes he wins enough in Korea to not have to increase the amount of hours at his job so that he can stay in Vainglory on a competitive level.”

CullTheMeek interviewed at VWI
© GankStars

“CullTheMeek has been looking for a passion for awhile. While smart, he currently has little motivation to go to college after finishing high school – he wants to first try to do something more hands-on. Vainglory is a perfect opportunity for Cull to find himself and get the experience he craves, both from the game and the travel.”

Villarin is serious about his education still. “For this fall he said he'd rather take a semester off than be half-focused on either of the two activities. His parents said they'll support him as long as Iraqi and Cull commit as well – they know the three are good together, whereas introducing someone new is an unknown level of risk.”

Vainglory is so young in fact that the team don’t quite know who to watch out for in the league. “We aren't very familiar with the South Korean scene because they stream on different websites and we don't understand the language. For VWI we only knew of Invincible Armada and Infamous. But our info about Armada was months out of date, which is one reason they beat European squad Unknown – Unknown had no recent videos to study their gameplay. I think for this league Invincible Armada is our main rival. We didn't have a problem defeating Infamous, but as we learned very well from VWI, never underestimate your enemy.”

For now at least, Vainglory is heading in the right direction as an eSport. The June's VGL paid $100 in prize money for first place. The VWI paid $11,000. The league will pay out around 90,000,000 won ($70,000), with the top team getting 40,000,000 (approximately $30,000). Developer Super Evil Megacorp knows it has a hit on its hands, and OGN’s league may not be the last as well as the first.

“The way we see it - this is our chance to grow into a real e-sports organisation,” Novosad says. “We want to ‘reinvent’ some other things in the business too, such as finding more cash flows for our players so they aren't reliant on winnings and sponsors alone to survive, and treating players right with good contracts and nice winnings distributions. We're working really hard on various other details such as merchandising, a system to allow the community to schedule lessons with our top players and so on. I think the more secure our players are, the better off we are as an organisation because less of them will be forced to go get a job and quit playing.”

When the league is over, Sirius plan to return home and try to carve out a place for themselves in the US. “Our plan is to come back after this league and play in Western leagues only, plus in worldwide events such as VWI,” Novosad says. “I'm not sure if the league will be copied over to North America and Europe right away. It may take another few months. But we really, really hope it will be.”

Maybe none of this will pan out, Vainglory will lose popularity and be shuttered, just like promising Warner Bros MOBA Infinite Crisis. Perhaps Novosad won’t get his visa in the nick of time again. At the very least though, Sirius and GankStars’ other upcoming squad, Polaris, will have a blast travelling the world playing the mobile game they love – who a few years ago saw watching others playing iPhone games as anything but annoyance, something to be endured on a cramped train or plane?

“This league is the first, it's history. We have to do it,” Novosad says. “We have to witness it. We're like kids at the candy shop. We all know how to be serious, but after all, life is about having fun. If I could drop everything and go play video games for a few months with good friends in a healthy, positive community of gamers, would I do it? You bet I would.”