What’s in Store?

The Future of Vainglory esports

Image from Vainglory Instagram

Vainglory 5v5 has slowly been rolled out to a few select people since the new game mode was showcased during worlds at the end of 2017. Super Evil Megacorp’s new game mode is highly anticipated for not only casual players, but for us hardcore esports’ fans as well. So far, SEMC has been working on finalizing the game to prepare for the 2.12 launch and the 3.0 launch in which they discussed in their “Look Ahead” announcement. In that announcement, they focused on UI, skin system overhaul, and future performance upgrades of the game. They never touched on the esports side of the game or when we could see announcements about how the new year of Vainglory esports will look. One thing we do know is that 2018 Vainglory esports will be 5v5.

What can we expect going forward towards spring? Obviously, major announcements from SEMC will be coming soon. I can speculate they have been working on dates and deals with all their sponsors and partnerships. Spring season would typically start in March and with the official free release of 5v5 coming attentively mid-February, there would not be much time in-between. Another thing I can assume is that the pro players will be given access to 5v5 as soon as possible to give them time on the client and game to test. I feel that while PBE players are extremely important in testing, we could see different results from pro players. If the strategy and competition is so intense across the board, I still think games could run a little longer than intended. Longer games would impact stream times on the weekends in which some people would say are already extremely long days.

Another thing that is a huge question mark, is what the player scene will look like. We have seen few to no official announcements from teams when it comes to what their 5v5 roster entails. I think that is smart, as they may want to do some shopping of players before they lock anything in. Unfortunately, I am not aware of when contracts are ending or when the free agency period will start for Vainglory. I did see a tweet from StartingAllOver mentioning player contracts ending in March.

If he is right, the free agency period would be short and quick, not giving players a lot of time to adjust. There also may not be a set free agency period like we see in the NA LCS and EU LCS for League of Legends. Heading into season 8, the LCS went franchise and every major team made big moves when it comes to their rosters. We saw teams go after power players within regions and even saw major importation of foreign players. A few major players from Misfits (EU) migrated to NA after having a successful run in worlds last year. So at what point is the Vainglory esports scene healthy enough for these types of moves?

In history of all sports, players “chasing a ring” or “chasing a trophy” have been present and sometimes controversial. This strategy does not always work. With sports and maybe even more in esports, communication and synergy is a crucial part of team performance. Throwing a bunch of all-star players together and expecting them to dominate from the beginning is rare. Growing pains will be present and will have to be overcome. Would people be upset if BestChuckNA leaves TSM to join a strong Cloud9 team in hopes of bettering his chances at success? Not to down play his career, he has been successful, but he hasn’t won that major championship in the last year. Players want to lift that trophy. TSM is a very large organization in which I think the team could use a shake up. Not in the aspect of dropping current roster, but in this case, adding a power house player to help them be a top team in 5v5. One player that comes to mind is Hundor, former laner of G2 esports. He made this announcement on twitter.

TSM going after a top tier laner in EU would be a huge addition to the current roster. Moves like these could start Vainglory down a similar path of players migrating to different regions. There are many things to take into factor such as a language barrier, team house, age, etc. Hundor speaks great english as he is interviewed after games often on stream. He is also very young and the last I knew, attending school. Moving to the states to join TSM in the team house could be a long shot. Of course, these are all just speculations.

I think once teams start filling rosters, we will see a lot of names from challengers being picked up on Vainglory8 teams. Just to remind those who have forgotten what the current NA Vainglory scene looks like, here is a list.

TSM

Cloud9

Rouge

Tribe Gaming

Hollywood Hammers

Nova eSports

Vision Gaming (Challenger)

Hazard/From Mars (Challenger)

All the teams from above will be looking for players heading into 5v5. Some have a five man roster, such as Nova eSports. They may stick with the players who have been playing in the VISPro and Halcyon Elite tournaments, or switch it up. For the sake of the article, let’s make some things up. I’ll pretend every team above has a current three man roster with one sub. Again, pretending the sub will become a starter for every team. That gives us four starters heading into 5v5 on each of the eight teams. Each team will need one more starter to fill their roster. So far, that is eight new players entering the scene. Now we look towards subs, which can be a little more difficult to predict. In 3v3, most teams had one sub. Some examples are TSM with LuckyBread and Cloud9 with R3cked. I would like to think that teams will need two subs on their roster for 5v5. Five total players mean you need to cover more unfortunate emergencies to where a player cannot travel or play. So that gives us another sixteen players being picked up by organizations. A grand total of twenty-four new players. I am unsure of how it will all work out heading into March, but I do believe that those players that have made a professional name for themselves within the scene, will have their hard work paid off.

The future of Vainglory and its esports scene is looking up and I mean way up. The announcements about format, schedule, and even teams regarding 2018, will be so hype once they hit! I plan on keeping track of all the information and getting as many articles out to you as possible.