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Players as flavour of the week

"Players right now don't understand that the market needs one thing for sure: stability. In order to build rosters that fans want to follow, want to be emotionally attached to, they need to create these teams. This is what made other games huge in the past and as LoL is a 5v5, we are looking at the same mechanics here.



On top of that sponsors want to invest and have to invest in something that lasts. Not knowing if the players a sponsor might want to put on a campaign will be there in two weeks from now and therefore destroy the whole campaign prevents money from being spent on LoL."

The recent North American shuffle got me thinking about the professionalism in League of Legends. Looking at the massiveness of upcoming and current tournaments (OGN Azubu, IPL, Season 2 Championships) and the substantial prizepools we might be eager to conclude that the game is obviously getting more professional.But we're still in need of some serious changes. Seeing the recent line-up changes and actually the constant teamswitches in the international scene, implementing new rules like transfer periods or use of contracts might be the necessary step forward. But with that thougt comes another question: who should implement such a change?This weekends major shuffle in the North American scene might have seemed massive, but is actually just the tip of the iceberg. Any League team- or newssite is flooded with articles on players jumping ship to new squads for a variety of reasons. This is, in my opinion, essentially not the problem. The League of Legends pro scene is a competitive environment and thus teams and players will always look for the best match for their setup, skill and character to achieve the best results.The problem, again in my opinion, is that players can hop teams at any time during the entire season, even in the middle of tournaments as we've seen with CLG in the Reign of Gaming Invitational. We want to believe that League of Legends is getting more and more professional, but the constant clanhopping can not be a part of that.SK-Gamings Managing Director Alexander Mueller agrees that this situation doesn't promote professionalism at all:Implementing the use of contracts or regulated transferperiods are both possible solutions. Let's take a closer look at these ideas.