Gaming
Gaming
Vainglory heads to Poland for the 2015 finals
We’ve got the inside story on the mobile MOBA hit’s next big championship, taking place in December.
Super Evil MegaCorp has been making in-roads in the eSports scene this year, positioning hit MOBA Vainglory as one of the first major competitive mobile games with a South Korean televised league in the summer. Now the studio has revealed its next big move after July’s Invitational: huge live events for its EU and North American finals, and we can exclusively reveal where.
The Autumn 2015 Live Finals kick off at the eSports Arena in Santa Ana, California, on December 4-6, while the European finals take place a week later, on December 11-13, at the ESL Studio in Katowice, Poland.
Tickets are on sale now. The events will see the top eight Vainglory teams in each region face off. Ahead of that, you can watch the VGL qualifiers next month on Twitch. Check the full schedule on the Vainglory website. They’ll battle it out for a stake of the global prizepool of $150,000 and the coveted Autumn 2015 championship – making this the biggest mobile-only eSports tournament yet.
To find out more about what to expect, we caught up with Super Evil MegaCorp’s chief operating officer Kristian Segerstrale. Read on to find out how the team are planning to upscale a game played on the device in your pocket to fit an arena.
When did you get the plan for these finals, and how long have people been working on them?
The Live Finals were always meant to be part of the seasonal structure for Vainglory. We want to tie in-game content with offline events and offer limited-time content and tournaments for our players. The Live Finals are a celebration of our community, and we're working together with our players to produce the events. We've been working on the Live Finals for the past month now and have our hands full creating the biggest mobile-only eSports tournaments ever.
Who will the casters be for them and how did you pick them?
The caster and analyst team will be led by our in-house shoutcasting talent Evan ‘PlayoffBeard’ Denbaum and George ‘Zekent’ Liu. Zekent is a former professional League of Legends player, a coach for Team Curse and prolific Twitch streamer. He is also now intimately involved in all Vainglory hero and item live-balance decisions, making him a uniquely qualified shoutcasting analyst.
PlayoffBeard, meanwhile, spent a decade in pro sports before transitioning to video games, including working in broadcasting for the National Hockey League, covering the NY Metro sports scene for the Connecticut Post, covering all sports for The Sporting News and covering Raw, SmackDown and pay-per-views for WWE. He can now apply his sports background to calling plays during Vainglory broadcasts. We’ll also be announcing additional casters soon.
Vainglory
© Super Evil MegaCorp
Why did you pick Katowice and Santa Ana as the locations? What can attendees expect apart from the tournament itself?
Katowice has recently played host to some of the biggest global eSports events. We chose it as a location together with ESL to have access to some of the top European eSports event management talent and facilities, as well as to anchor Vainglory at one of the hot spots of the European eSports scene.
For the North American event, we're excited to partner with eSports Arena in Santa Ana, California. ESports Arena have a wonderful facility and some incredible talent for production that we are excited to partner with. Both events, though, are fundamentally a celebration of our community, the game and the Autumn 2015 season. We want to share wonderful competitive gaming moments, but also help the community get to know each other, play matches of their own and have fun together. We’re also saying thanks by giving attendees a voucher for a free unlock to Vainglory’s next hero. There’s also rumours of a merch shop and a party!
How will people who can't attend be able to watch? What's the sort of infrastructure actually required to stream a tournament where the game is played on tablets rather than PCs?
All the events will be livestreamed on our Twitch channel, so anyone can tune in. As for the set-up: Vainglory is played on touchscreens. Some players choose to play on iPads or iPhones, and others choose to play on Android devices of various sizes. It’s actually really fun and interesting to see the diverse devices, form factors and play styles teams use to compete. From a player perspective, it’s very simple: players bring their own devices, connect to the specifically tuned tournament Wi-Fi with a special tournament Vainglory client, and then play.
From a spectator perspective, we are utilising our desktop-based multi-spectation system that allows for 4K capture and free camera, enabling the director to zoom in on the action from any angle and then cut to a zoomed-out map view to illustrate strategies or rotations. We’re excited that the tournament scene has grown so quickly around Vainglory and look forward to making every event a little big bigger and better than the last.
It's early days, but who do you expect to see in the final stages of the Euro and NA finals, and who would you like to see?
GankStars in NA and R3D in EU will be the favourites heading into the November VGL qualifiers, but we’ve seen emerging teams making deep, unexpected runs, which is a big part of the fun of watching. In the first VGL NA qualifier, a team of Chinese players living in America called VON scored a number of upsets and made it all the way to the qualifier finals, despite being seeded 20 in the tournament.
